Neural network–augmented Pfaffian wave-functions for scalable simulations of interacting fermions

Developing accurate numerical methods for strongly interacting fermions is crucial for improving our understanding of various quantum many-body phenomena, especially unconventional superconductivity. Recently, neural quantum states have emerged as a promising approach for studying correlated fermions, highlighted by the hidden fermion and backflow methods, which use neural networks to model corrections to fermionic quasiparticle orbitals. In this work, we expand these ideas to the space of Pfaffians, a wave-function that naturally expresses superconducting pairings, and propose the hidden fermion Pfaffian state (HFPS), which flexibly represents both unpaired and superconducting phases and scales to large systems with favorable asymptotic complexity. In our numerical experiments, HFPS provides state-of-the-art variational accuracy in different regimes of both the attractive and repulsive Hubbard models. We show that the HFPS is able to capture general phases with and without pairing, and therefore may be a useful tool for modeling phases with unconventional superconductivity.