Sandro Sorella

Giacomo Tenti, Kousuke Nakano, Andrea Tirelli et al.

We present a study of the principal deuterium Hugoniot for pressures up to $150$ GPa, using Machine Learning potentials (MLPs) trained with Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) energies, forces and pressures. In particular, we adopted a recently proposed workflow based on the combination of Gaussian kernel regression and $Δ$-learning. By fully taking advantage of this method, we explicitly considered finite-temperature electrons in the dynamics, whose effects are highly relevant for temperatures above $10$ kK. The Hugoniot curve obtained by our MLPs shows a good agreement with the most recent experiments, particularly in the region below 60 GPa. At larger pressures, our Hugoniot curve is slightly more compressible than the one yielded by experiments, whose uncertainties generally increase, however, with pressure. Our work demonstrates that QMC can be successfully combined with $Δ$-learning to deploy reliable MLPs for complex extended systems across different thermodynamic conditions, by keeping the QMC precision at the computational cost of a mean-field calculation.

Andrea Tirelli, Giacomo Tenti, Kousuke Nakano et al.

We have developed a technique combining the accuracy of quantum Monte Carlo in describing the electron correlation with the efficiency of a Machine Learning Potential (MLP). We use kernel regression in combination with SOAP (Smooth Overlap of Atomic Position) features, implemented here in a very efficient way. The key ingredients are: i) a sparsification technique, based on farthest point sampling, ensuring generality and transferability of our MLPs and ii) the so called $Δ$-learning, allowing a small training data set, a fundamental property for highly accurate but computationally demanding calculations, such as the ones based on quantum Monte Carlo. As the first application we present a benchmark study of the liquid-liquid transition of high-pressure hydrogen and show the quality of our MLP, by emphasizing the importance of high accuracy for this very debated subject, where experiments are difficult in the lab, and theory is still far from being conclusive.