DanceQ: High-performance library for number-conserving bases

Abstract

The complexity of quantum many-body problems scales exponentially with the size of the system, rendering any finite size scaling analysis a formidable challenge. This is particularly true for methods based on the full representation of the wave function, where one simply accepts the enormous Hilbert space dimensions and performs linear algebra operations, e.g., for finding the ground state of the Hamiltonian. If the system satisfies an underlying symmetry where an operator with degenerate spectrum commutes with the Hamiltonian, it can be block-diagonalized, thus reducing the complexity at the expense of additional bookkeeping. At the most basic level, required for Krylov space techniques (like the Lanczos algorithm) it is necessary to implement a matrix-vector product of a block of the Hamiltonian with arbitrary block-wavefunctions, potentially without holding the Hamiltonian block in memory. An efficient implementation of this operation requires the calculation of the position of an arbitrary basis vector in the canonical ordering of the basis of the block. We present here an elegant and powerful, multi-dimensional approach to this problem for the $U(1)$ symmetry appearing in problems with particle number conservation. Our divide-and-conquer algorithm uses multiple subsystems and hence generalizes previous approaches to make them scalable. In addition to the theoretical presentation of our algorithm, we provide DanceQ, a flexible and modern - header only - C++20 implementation to manipulate, enumerate, and map to its index any basis state in a given particle number sector as open source software under https://DanceQ.gitlab.io/danceq.