Variational Approach to Projected Entangled Pair States at Finite Temperature

The projected entangled pair state (PEPS) ansatz can represent a thermal state in a strongly correlated system. We introduce a novel variational algorithm to optimize this tensor network. Since full tensor environment is taken into account, then with increasing bond dimension the optimized PEPS becomes the exact Gibbs state. Our presentation opens with a 1D version for a matrix product state (MPS) and then generalizes to PEPS in 2D. Benchmark results in the quantum Ising model are presented.