No Arabic abstract
We investigate the coarse-graining of host-guest systems under the perspective of the local distribution of pore occupancies, along with the physical meaning and actual computability of the coarse-interaction terms. We show that the widely accepted approach, in which the contributions to the free energy given by the molecules located in two neighboring pores are estimated through Monte Carlo simulations where the two pores are kept separated from the rest of the system, leads to inaccurate results at high sorbate densities. In the coarse-graining strategy that we propose, which is based on the Bethe-Peierls approximation, density-independent interaction terms are instead computed according to local effective potentials that take into account the correlations between the pore pair and its surroundings by means of mean-field correction terms, without the need of simulating the pore pair separately. Use of the interaction parameters obtained this way allows the coarse-grained system to reproduce more closely the equilibrium properties of the original one. Results are shown for lattice-gases where the local free energy can be computed exactly, and for a system of Lennard-Jones particles under the effect of a static confining field.
We investigate the spatial coarse-graining of interactions in host-guest systems within the framework of the recently proposed Interacting Pair Approximation (IPA). Basically, the IPA method derives local effective interactions from the knowledge of the bivariate histograms of the number of sorbate molecules (occupancy) in a pair of neighboring subvolumes, taken at different values of the chemical potential. Here we extend the IPA approach to the case in which every subvolume is surrounded by more than one class of neighbors, and we apply it on two systems: methane on a single graphene layer and methane between two graphene layers, at several temperatures and sorbate densities. We obtain coarse-grained (CG) adsorption isotherms and reduced variances of the occupancy in a quantitative agreement with reference atomistic simulations. A quantitative matching is also obtained for the occupancy correlations between neighboring subvolumes, apart from the case of high sorbate densities at low temperature, where the matching is refined by pre-processing the histograms through a quantized bivariate Gaussian distribution model.
Within the discrete gauge theory which is the basis of spin foam models, the problem of macroscopically faithful coarse graining is studied. Macroscopic data is identified; it contains the holonomy evaluation along a discrete set of loops and the homotopy classes of certain maps. When two configurations share this data they are related by a local deformation. The interpretation is that such configurations differ by microscopic details. In many cases the homotopy type of the relevant maps is trivial for every connection; two important cases in which the homotopy data is composed by a set of integer numbers are: (i) a two dimensional base manifold and structure group U(1), (ii) a four dimensional base manifold and structure group SU(2). These cases are relevant for spin foam models of two dimensional gravity and four dimensional gravity respectively. This result suggests that if spin foam models for two-dimensional and four-dimensional gravity are modified to include all the relevant macroscopic degrees of freedom -the complete collection of macroscopic variables necessary to ensure faithful coarse graining-, then they could provide appropriate effective theories at a given scale.
A fundamental challenge in materials science pertains to elucidating the relationship between stoichiometry, stability, structure, and property. Recent advances have shown that machine learning can be used to learn such relationships, allowing the stability and functional properties of materials to be accurately predicted. However, most of these approaches use atomic coordinates as input and are thus bottlenecked by crystal structure identification when investigating novel materials. Our approach solves this bottleneck by coarse-graining the infinite search space of atomic coordinates into a combinatorially enumerable search space. The key idea is to use Wyckoff representations -- coordinate-free sets of symmetry-related positions in a crystal -- as the input to a machine learning model. Our model demonstrates exceptionally high precision in discovering new stable materials, identifying 1,558 materials that lie below the known convex hull of previously calculated materials from just 5,675 ab-initio calculations. Our approach opens up fundamental advances in computational materials discovery.
We propose and illustrate an approach to coarse-graining the dynamics of evolving networks (networks whose connectivity changes dynamically). The approach is based on the equation-free framework: short bursts of detailed network evolution simulations are coupled with lifting and restriction operators that translate between actual network realizations and their (appropriately chosen) coarse observables. This framework is used here to accelerate temporal simulations (through coarse projective integration), and to implement coarsegrained fixed point algorithms (through matrix-free Newton-Krylov GMRES). The approach is illustrated through a simple network evolution example, for which analytical approximations to the coarse-grained dynamics can be independently obtained, so as to validate the computational results. The scope and applicability of the approach, as well as the issue of selection of good coarse observables are discussed.
The dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) and its DCA$^+$ extension use coarse-graining of the momentum space to reduce the complexity of quantum many-body problems, thereby mapping the bulk lattice to a cluster embedded in a dynamical mean-field host. Here, we introduce a new form of an interlaced coarse-graining and compare it with the traditional coarse-graining. While it gives a more localized self-energy for a given cluster size, we show that it leads to more controlled results with weaker cluster shape and smoother cluster size dependence, which converge to the results obtained from the standard coarse-graining with increasing cluster size. Most importantly, the new coarse-graining reduces the severity of the fermionic sign problem of the underlying quantum Monte Carlo cluster solver and thus allows for calculations on larger clusters. This enables the treatment of longer-ranged correlations than those accessible with the standard coarse-graining and thus can allow for the evaluation of the exact infinite cluster size result via finite size scaling. As a demonstration, we study the hole-doped two-dimensional Hubbard model and show that the interlaced coarse-graining in combination with the extended DCA$^+$ algorithm permits the determination of the superconducting $T_c$ on cluster sizes for which the results can be fit with a Kosterlitz-Thouless scaling law.