No Arabic abstract
Density functional theory underlies the most successful and widely used numerical methods for electronic structure prediction of solids. However, it has the fundamental shortcoming that the universal density functional is unknown. In addition, the computational result---energy and charge density distribution of the ground state---is useful for electronic properties of solids mostly when reduced to a band structure interpretation based on the Kohn-Sham approach. Here, we demonstrate how machine learning algorithms can help to free density functional theory from these limitations. We study a theory of spinless fermions on a one-dimensional lattice. The density functional is implicitly represented by a neural network, which predicts, besides the ground-state energy and density distribution, density-density correlation functions. At no point do we require a band structure interpretation. The training data, obtained via exact diagonalization, feeds into a learning scheme inspired by active learning, which minimizes the computational costs for data generation. We show that the network results are of high quantitative accuracy and, despite learning on random potentials, capture both symmetry-breaking and topological phase transitions correctly.
The frequency-dependent response of a one-dimensional fermion system is investigated using Current Density Functional Theory (CDFT) within the local approximation (LDA). DFT-LDA, and in particular CDFT-LDA, reproduces very well the dispersion of the collective excitations. Unsurprisingly, however, the approximation fails for details of the dynamic response for large wavevectors. In particular, we introduce CDFT for the one-dimensional spinless fermion model with nearest-neighbor interaction, and use CDFT-LDA plus exact (Bethe ansatz) results for the groundstate energy as function of particle density and boundary phase to determine the linear response. The successes and failures of this approach are discussed in detail.
We study anomalous transport arising in disordered one-dimensional spin chains, specifically focusing on the subdiffusive transport typically found in a phase preceding the many-body localization transition. Different types of transport can be distinguished by the scaling of the average resistance with the systems length. We address the following question: what is the distribution of resistance over different disorder realizations, and how does it differ between transport types? In particular, an often evoked so-called Griffiths picture, that aims to explain slow transport as being due to rare regions of high disorder, would predict that the diverging resistivity is due to fat power-law tails in the resistance distribution. Studying many-particle systems with and without interactions we do not find any clear signs of fat tails. The data is compatible with distributions that decay faster than any power law required by the fat tails scenario. Among the distributions compatible with the data, a simple additivity argument suggests a Gaussian distribution for a fractional power of the resistance.
The quantum dynamics of an ensemble of interacting electrons in an array of random scatterers is treated using a new numerical approach for the calculation of average values of quantum operators and time correlation functions in the Wigner representation. The Fourier transform of the product of matrix elements of the dynamic propagators obeys an integral Wigner-Liouville-type equation. Initial conditions for this equation are given by the Fourier transform of the Wiener path integral representation of the matrix elements of the propagators at the chosen initial times. This approach combines both molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods and computes numerical traces and spectra of the relevant dynamical quantities such as momentum-momentum correlation functions and spatial dispersions. Considering as an application a system with fixed scatterers, the results clearly demonstrate that the many-particle interaction between the electrons leads to an enhancement of the conductivity and spatial dispersion compared to the noninteracting case.
We train a neural network as the universal exchange-correlation functional of density-functional theory that simultaneously reproduces both the exact exchange-correlation energy and potential. This functional is extremely non-local, but retains the computational scaling of traditional local or semi-local approximations. It therefore holds the promise of solving some of the delocalization problems that plague density-functional theory, while maintaining the computational efficiency that characterizes the Kohn-Sham equations. Furthermore, by using automatic differentiation, a capability present in modern machine-learning frameworks, we impose the exact mathematical relation between the exchange-correlation energy and the potential, leading to a fully consistent method. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by looking at one-dimensional systems with two strongly-correlated electrons, where density-functional methods are known to fail, and investigate the behavior and performance of our functional by varying the degree of non-locality.
In [arxiv:2106.02560] we proposed a reduced density matrix functional theory (RDMFT) for calculating energies of selected eigenstates of interacting many-fermion systems. Here, we develop a solid foundation for this so-called $boldsymbol{w}$-RDMFT and present the details of various derivations. First, we explain how a generalization of the Ritz variational principle to ensemble states with fixed weights $boldsymbol{w}$ in combination with the constrained search would lead to a universal functional of the one-particle reduced density matrix. To turn this into a viable functional theory, however, we also need to implement an exact convex relaxation. This general procedure includes Valones pioneering work on ground state RDMFT as the special case $boldsymbol{w}=(1,0,ldots)$. Then, we work out in a comprehensive manner a methodology for deriving a compact description of the functionals domain. This leads to a hierarchy of generalized exclusion principle constraints which we illustrate in great detail. By anticipating their future pivotal role in functional theories and to keep our work self-contained, several required concepts from convex analysis are introduced and discussed.