Simulation of quantum many-body systems with strings of operators and Monte Carlo tensor contractions

We introduce string-bond states, a class of states obtained by placing strings of operators on a lattice, which encompasses the relevant states in quantum information. For string-bond states, expectation values of local observables can be computed efficiently using Monte Carlo sampling, making them suitable for a variational algorithm which extends the density matrix renormalization group to higher dimensional and irregular systems. Numerical results demonstrate the applicability of these states to the simulation of many-body systems.