Combining neural networks and signed particles to simulate quantum systems more efficiently, Part III

Abstract

This work belongs to a series of articles which have been dedicated to the combination of signed particles and neural networks to speed up the time-dependent simulation of quantum systems. More specifically, the suggested networks are utilized to compute the function known as the Wigner kernel. In the first paper, we suggested a network which is completely defined analytically and which does not necessitate any training process. Although very useful, this approach keeps the same complexity as the more standard finite difference methods. In the second work, we presented a different architecture which has generalization capabilities. Although more convenient in terms of computational time, it still uses a similar structure compared to the previous approach, with less neurons in the hidden layer but with the same expensive activation functions (sine functions). In this work, we focus on neural networks without any prior physics based knowledge. In more details, the network now consists of different hidden layers which are based on more common, and less computationally expensive, activation functions such as rectified linear units, and which focus on predicting only one column of the discretized Wigner kernel at a time. This new suggested architecture proves to accurately learn the transform from the space of potential functions to the space of Wigner kernels and performs very well during the simulation of quantum systems (20 times faster). Finally, we simulate a one-dimensional quantum system consisting of a wave packet impinging on a potential barrier for validation purposes. This represents one further step ahead to achieve fast and reliable simulations of time-dependent quantum systems.