Deep generative modelling of canonical ensemble with differentiable thermal properties

Abstract: We propose a variational modelling method with differentiable temperature for canonical ensembles. Using a deep generative model, the free energy is estimated and minimized simultaneously in a continuous temperature range. At optimal, this generative model is a Boltzmann distribution with temperature dependence. The training process requires no dataset, and works with arbitrary explicit density generative models. We applied our method to study the phase transitions (PT) in the Ising and XY models, and showed that the direct-sampling simulation of our model is as accurate as the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, but more efficient. Moreover, our method can give thermodynamic quantities as differentiable functions of temperature akin to an analytical solution. The free energy aligns closely with the exact one to the second-order derivative, so this inclusion of temperature dependence enables the otherwise biased variational model to capture the subtle thermal effects at the PTs. These findings shed light on the direct simulation of physical systems using deep generative models