5–8 Sept 2023
Department of Physics, University of Coimbra
Europe/Lisbon timezone
Book of Abstracts available for download !

Variational principle to regularize machine-learned density functionals

6 Sept 2023, 17:45
15m
Department of Physics, University of Coimbra

Department of Physics, University of Coimbra

R. Larga, 3004-516 Coimbra, Portugal
Oral Communication Oral communications

Speaker

Pablo del Mazo Sevillano

Description

Practical density functional theory (DFT) owes its success to the groundbreaking work of Kohn and Sham that introduced the exact calculation of the non-interacting kinetic energy of the electrons using an auxiliary mean-field system. However, the full power of DFT will not be unleashed until the exact relationship between the electron density and the non-interacting kinetic energy is found. Various attempts have been made to approximate this functional, similar to the exchange-correlation functional, with much less success due to the larger contribution of kinetic energy and its more non-local nature. In this work we propose a new and efficient regularization method to train density functionals based on deep neural networks, with particular interest in the kinetic-energy functional. The method is tested on (effectively) one-dimensional systems, including the hydrogen chain, non-interacting electrons, and atoms of the first two periods, with excellent results. For the atomic systems, the generalizability of the regularization method is demonstrated by training also an exchange-correlation functional, and the contrasting nature of the two functionals is discussed from a machine-learning perspective.

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