Viewpoint: Neural Networks Identify Topological Phases

A detailed characterization of phases of matter is at the forefront of research in condensed-matter and statistical physics. Although physicists have made incredible progress in the characterization of a wide variety of phases, the identification of novel topological phases remains challenging. Now, Yi Zhang and Eun-Ah Kim from Cornell University, New York [1], have taken a big-data approach to tackling this problem. In their work, thousands of microscopic "images" or "snapshots" of a phase, created using a special topography procedure, are fed into a machine-learning algorithm that is trained to decide whether these images come from a topological or a conventional phase of matter--exactly as modern computer vision algorithms are designed to tell cats from dogs in a picture. Traditionally, phases of matter are differentiated by their symmetry properties [2].