Machine learning phases of matter

The success of machine learning techniques in handling big data sets proves ideal for classifying condensed-matter phases and phase transitions. The technique is even amenable to detecting non-trivial states lacking in conventional order. Condensed-matter physics is the study of the collective behaviour of infinitely complex assemblies of electrons, nuclei, magnetic moments, atoms or qubits1. This complexity is reflected in the size of the state space, which grows exponentially with the number of particles, reminiscent of the ‘curse of dimensionality’ commonly encountered in machine learning2. Despite this curse, the machine learning community has developed techniques with remarkable abilities to recognize, classify, and characterize complex sets of data. Here, we show that modern machine learning architectures, such as fully connected and convolutional neural networks3, can identify phases and phase transitions in a variety of condensed-matter Hamiltonians. Readily programmable through modern software libraries4,5, neural networks can be trained to detect multiple types of order parameter, as well as highly non-trivial states with no conventional order, directly from raw state configurations sampled with Monte Carlo6,7.