Machine learning electron correlation in a disordered medium
This work addresses computational challenges in materials science for researchers studying electron correlation and disorder, but it is incremental as it applies an existing deep learning method to a specific model.
The authors tackled the problem of predicting electron behavior in strongly correlated disordered systems by training a neural network on ground states from the Anderson-Hubbard model, achieving accurate predictions of quantities like local double occupation probability and quasiparticle weight.
Learning from data has led to a paradigm shift in computational materials science. In particular, it has been shown that neural networks can learn the potential energy surface and interatomic forces through examples, thus bypassing the computationally expensive density functional theory calculations. Combining many-body techniques with a deep learning approach, we demonstrate that a fully-connected neural network is able to learn the complex collective behavior of electrons in strongly correlated systems. Specifically, we consider the Anderson-Hubbard (AH) model, which is a canonical system for studying the interplay between electron correlation and strong localization. The ground states of the AH model on a square lattice are obtained using the real-space Gutzwiller method. The obtained solutions are used to train a multi-task multi-layer neural network, which subsequently can accurately predict quantities such as the local probability of double occupation and the quasiparticle weight, given the disorder potential in the neighborhood as the input.