Equivalence and Divergence of Imaginary-Time Evolution and Gradient Descent for Gaussian Variational States

Abstract: Imaginary-time evolution (ITE) is one of the most widely used numerical techniques for obtaining ground states of many-body Hamiltonians. In this work, we compare ITE with gradient descent (GD) within the framework of Gaussian wavefunction ansatze. We show that while ITE and GD are formally equivalent for fermionic systems, GD exhibits consistently faster convergence for bosonic systems, challenging the common assumption of their complete equivalence.