Measuring Berry curvature with quantum Monte Carlo

Abstract: The Berry curvature and its descendant, the Berry phase, play an important role in quantum mechanics. They can be used to understand the Aharonov-Bohm effect, define topological Chern numbers, and generally to investigate the geometric properties of a quantum ground state manifold. While Berry curvature has been well-studied in the regimes of few-body physics and non-interacting particles, its use in the regime of strong interactions is hindered by the lack of numerical methods to solve it. In this paper we fill this gap by implementing a quantum Monte Carlo method to solve for the Berry curvature, based on interpreting Berry curvature as a leading correction to imaginary time ramps. We demonstrate our algorithm using the transverse-field Ising model in one and two dimensions, the latter of which is non-integrable. Despite the fact that the Berry curvature gives information about the phase of the wave function, we show that our algorithm has no sign or phase problem for standard sign-problem-free Hamiltonians. Our algorithm scales similarly to conventional methods as a function of system size and energy gap, and therefore should prove a valuable tool in investigating the quantum geometry of many-body systems.