Autonomous phase discovery

Understanding quantum phases of matter has long relied on physicists' intuition and mathematical tools such as symmetry and topology. Remarkably successful as these approaches have been, they provide no universal way to explore a Hamiltonian space whose organizing principle is not known in advance. In this work, we introduce a fully autonomous system combining differentiable programming and unsupervised learning for quantum phase discovery. The search evaluates ground-state data along an adaptive trajectory rather than on a predetermined parameter grid. We demonstrate the system with three different solvers and benchmark it against random sampling at equal ground-state-evaluation budgets. On a generalized cluster chain hosting up to 200 distinct phases, the search finds up to 25 more phases at the same budget, and matches random sampling given thirty times its budget. On a 50-parameter Chern insulator, it reaches sectors not obtained by the simple harmonic constructions considered here, in a family whose inverse problem remains open, while recovering all sectors found by sampling. Our results establish autonomous, gradient-driven exploration of Hamiltonian space as a practical route to discovering quantum phases without phase labels or a prescribed target phase.