arXiv subjects

Christoph Ortner

Publications and source records attributed to Christoph Ortner.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Analysis of local structure of mechanical and thermal rearrangements in glasses with the atomic cluster expansion

We explore the structural signatures of excitations in amorphous materials with the atomic cluster expansion (ACE), a universal and complete linear basis of descriptors of the atomic environment. Body-orderd linear classifiers are constructed that distinguish between active and inactive particles in three different model glass formers, in which structural relaxation occurs either through spontaneous thermal activation or by simple shear. We find that in binary mixtures, maximum prediction accuracy is already achieved with very few two-body correlations, while a polymer glass requires both two- and three-body correlations. Trends are robust across both activation mechanisms.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2024

Equivariant Representation of Configuration-Dependent Friction Tensors in Langevin Heatbaths

Dynamics of coarse-grained particle systems derived via the Mori-Zwanzig projection formalism commonly take the form of a (generalized) Langevin equation with configuration-dependent friction and diffusion tensors. In this article, we introduce a class of equivariant representations of tensor-valued functions based on the Atomic Cluster Expansion (ACE) framework that allows for efficient learning of such configuration-dependent friction and diffusion tensors from data. Besides satisfying the correct equivariance properties with respect to the Euclidean group E(3), the resulting heat bath models satisfy a fluctuation-dissipation relation. Moreover, our models can be extended to include additional symmetries, such as momentum conservation, to preserve the hydrodynamic properties of the particle system. We demonstrate the capabilities of the model by constructing a model of configuration-dependent tensorial electronic friction calculated from first principles that arises during reactive molecular dynamics at metal surfaces.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Parameterizing Intersecting Surfaces via Invariants

We introduce and analyze numerical companion matrix methods for the reconstruction of hypersurfaces with crossings from smooth interpolants given unordered or, without loss of generality, value-sorted data. The problem is motivated by the desire to machine learn potential energy surfaces arising in molecular excited state computational chemistry applications. We present simplified models which reproduce the analytically predicted convergence and stability behaviors as well as two application-oriented numerical experiments: the electronic excited states of Graphene featuring Dirac conical cusps and energy surfaces corresponding to a sulfur dioxide ($SO_2$) molecule in different configurations.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Self-consistent Coulomb interactions for machine learning interatomic potentials

A ubiquitous approach to obtain transferable machine learning-based models of potential energy surfaces for atomistic systems is to decompose the total energy into a sum of local atom-centred contributions. However, in many systems non-negligible long-range electrostatic effects must be taken into account as well. We introduce a general mathematical framework to study how such long-range effects can be included in a way that (i) allows charge equilibration and (ii) retains the locality of the learnable atom-centred contributions to ensure transferability. Our results give partial explanations for the success of existing machine learned potentials that include equilibriation and provide perspectives how to design such schemes in a systematic way. To complement the rigorous theoretical results, we describe a practical scheme for fitting the energy and electron density of water clusters.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Higher-order Far-field Boundary Conditions for Crystalline Defects

Crystalline materials exhibit long-range elastic fields due to the presence of defects, leading to significant domain size effects in atomistic simulations. A rigorous far-field expansion of these long-range fields identifies low-rank structure in the form of a sum of discrete multipole terms and continuum correctors. We propose a novel numerical scheme that exploits this low-rank structure to accelerate material defect simulations by minimizing the domain size effects. Our approach iteratively improves the boundary condition, systematically following the asymptotic expansion of the far field. We provide both rigorous error estimates for the method and a range of empirical numerical tests, to assess it's convergence and robustness.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Surrogate models for vibrational entropy based on a spatial decomposition

The temperature-dependent behavior of defect densities within a crystalline structure is intricately linked to the phenomenon of vibrational entropy. Traditional methods for evaluating vibrational entropy are computationally intensive, limiting their practical utility. We show that total entropy can be decomposed into atomic site contributions and rigorously estimate the locality of site entropy. This analysis suggests that vibrational entropy can be effectively predicted using a surrogate model for site entropy. We employ machine learning to develop such a surrogate models employing the Atomic Cluster Expansion model. We supplement our rigorous analysis with an empirical convergence study. In addition we demonstrate the performance of our method for predicting vibrational formation entropy and attempt frequency of the transition rates, on point defects such as vacancies and interstitials.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

A Posteriori Error Estimate and Adaptivity for QM/MM Models of Crystalline Defects

Hybrid quantum/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) models play a pivotal role in molecular simulations. These models provide a balance between accuracy, surpassing pure MM models, and computational efficiency, offering advantages over pure QM models. Adaptive approaches have been developed to further improve this balance by allowing on-the-fly selection of the QM and MM subsystems as necessary. We propose a novel and robust adaptive QM/MM method for practical material defect simulations. To ensure mathematical consistency with the QM reference model, we employ machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) as the MM models. Our adaptive QM/MM method utilizes a residual-based error estimator that provides both upper and lower bounds for the approximation error, thus indicating its reliability and efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce a novel adaptive algorithm capable of anisotropically updating the QM/MM partitions. This update is based on the proposed residual-based error estimator and involves solving a free interface motion problem, which is efficiently achieved using the fast marching method. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach via numerical tests on a wide range of crystalline defects.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Equivariant Matrix Function Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), especially message-passing neural networks (MPNNs), have emerged as powerful architectures for learning on graphs in diverse applications. However, MPNNs face challenges when modeling non-local interactions in graphs such as large conjugated molecules, and social networks due to oversmoothing and oversquashing. Although Spectral GNNs and traditional neural networks such as recurrent neural networks and transformers mitigate these challenges, they often lack generalizability, or fail to capture detailed structural relationships or symmetries in the data. To address these concerns, we introduce Matrix Function Neural Networks (MFNs), a novel architecture that parameterizes non-local interactions through analytic matrix equivariant functions. Employing resolvent expansions offers a straightforward implementation and the potential for linear scaling with system size. The MFN architecture achieves stateof-the-art performance in standard graph benchmarks, such as the ZINC and TU datasets, and is able to capture intricate non-local interactions in quantum systems, paving the way to new state-of-the-art force fields.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

Atomic Cluster Expansion without Self-Interaction

The Atomic Cluster Expansion (ACE) (Drautz, Phys. Rev. B 99, 2019) has been widely applied in high energy physics, quantum mechanics and atomistic modeling to construct many-body interaction models respecting physical symmetries. Computational efficiency is achieved by allowing non-physical self-interaction terms in the model. We propose and analyze an efficient method to evaluate and parameterize an orthogonal, or, non-self-interacting cluster expansion model. We present numerical experiments demonstrating improved conditioning and more robust approximation properties than the original expansion in regression tasks both in simplified toy problems and in applications in the machine learning of interatomic potentials.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

A Theoretical Case Study of the Generalisation of Machine-learned Potentials

Machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are typically trained on datasets that encompass a restricted subset of possible input structures, which presents a potential challenge for their generalization to a broader range of systems outside the training set. Nevertheless, MLIPs have demonstrated impressive accuracy in predicting forces and energies in simulations involving intricate and complex structures. In this paper we aim to take steps towards rigorously explaining the excellent observed generalisation properties of MLIPs. Specifically, we offer a comprehensive theoretical and numerical investigation of the generalization of MLIPs in the context of dislocation simulations. We quantify precisely how the accuracy of such simulations is directly determined by a few key factors: the size of the training structures, the choice of training observations (e.g., energies, forces, virials), and the level of accuracy achieved in the fitting process. Notably, our study reveals the crucial role of fitting virials in ensuring the consistency of MLIPs for dislocation simulations. Our series of careful numerical experiments encompassing screw, edge, and mixed dislocations, supports existing best practices in the MLIPs literature but also provides new insights into the design of data sets and loss functions.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

Thermodynamic Limits of Electronic Systems

We review thermodynamic limits and scaling limits of electronic structure models for condensed matter. We discuss several mathematical ways to implement these limits in three models of increasing chemical complexity and mathematical difficulty: (1) Thomas-Fermi like models; (2) Hartree-Fock like models; and (3) Kohn-Sham density functional theory models.

math-ph↗

arXiv2023

ACEpotentials.jl: A Julia Implementation of the Atomic Cluster Expansion

We introduce ACEpotentials.jl, a Julia-language software package that constructs interatomic potentials from quantum mechanical reference data using the Atomic Cluster Expansion (Drautz, 2019). As the latter provides a complete description of atomic environments, including invariance to overall translation and rotation as well as permutation of like atoms, the resulting potentials are systematically improvable and data efficient. Furthermore, the descriptor's expressiveness enables use of a linear model, facilitating rapid evaluation and straightforward application of Bayesian techniques for active learning. We summarize the capabilities of ACEpotentials.jl and demonstrate its strengths (simplicity, interpretability, robustness, performance) on a selection of prototypical atomistic modelling workflows.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

On the Atomic Cluster Expansion: interatomic potentials and beyond

The Atomic Cluster Expansion (ACE) [R. Drautz, Phys. Rev. B, 99:014104 (2019)] provides a systematically improvable, universal descriptor for the environment of an atom that is invariant to permutation, translation and rotation. ACE is being used extensively in newly emerging interatomic potentials based on machine learning. This commentary discusses the ACE framework and its potential impact.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

Retrieval of Boost Invariant Symbolic Observables via Feature Importance

Deep learning approaches for jet tagging in high-energy physics are characterized as black boxes that process a large amount of information from which it is difficult to extract key distinctive observables. In this proceeding, we present an alternative to deep learning approaches, Boost Invariant Polynomials, which enables direct analysis of simple analytic expressions representing the most important features in a given task. Further, we show how this approach provides an extremely low dimensional classifier with a minimum set of features representing %effective discriminating physically relevant observables and how it consequently speeds up the algorithm execution, with relatively close performance to the algorithm using the full information.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

A General Framework for Equivariant Neural Networks on Reductive Lie Groups

Reductive Lie Groups, such as the orthogonal groups, the Lorentz group, or the unitary groups, play essential roles across scientific fields as diverse as high energy physics, quantum mechanics, quantum chromodynamics, molecular dynamics, computer vision, and imaging. In this paper, we present a general Equivariant Neural Network architecture capable of respecting the symmetries of the finite-dimensional representations of any reductive Lie Group G. Our approach generalizes the successful ACE and MACE architectures for atomistic point clouds to any data equivariant to a reductive Lie group action. We also introduce the lie-nn software library, which provides all the necessary tools to develop and implement such general G-equivariant neural networks. It implements routines for the reduction of generic tensor products of representations into irreducible representations, making it easy to apply our architecture to a wide range of problems and groups. The generality and performance of our approach are demonstrated by applying it to the tasks of top quark decay tagging (Lorentz group) and shape recognition (orthogonal group).

stat.ML↗

arXiv2023

A Multilevel Method for Many-Electron Schrödinger Equations Based on the Atomic Cluster Expansion

The atomic cluster expansion (ACE) (Drautz, 2019) yields a highly efficient and intepretable parameterisation of symmetric polynomials that has achieved great success in modelling properties of many-particle systems. In the present work we extend the practical applicability of the ACE framework to the computation of many-electron wave functions. To that end, we develop a customized variational Monte-Carlo algorithm that exploits the sparsity and hierarchical properties of ACE wave functions. We demonstrate the feasibility on a range of proof-of-concept applications to one-dimensional systems.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

Polynomial Approximation of Symmetric Functions

We study the polynomial approximation of symmetric multivariate functions and of multi-set functions. Specifically, we consider $f(x_1, \dots, x_N)$, where $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, and $f$ is invariant under permutations of its $N$ arguments. We demonstrate how these symmetries can be exploited to improve the cost versus error ratio in a polynomial approximation of the function $f$, and in particular study the dependence of that ratio on $d, N$ and the polynomial degree. These results are then used to construct approximations and prove approximation rates for functions defined on multi-sets where $N$ becomes a parameter of the input.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

MACE: Higher Order Equivariant Message Passing Neural Networks for Fast and Accurate Force Fields

Creating fast and accurate force fields is a long-standing challenge in computational chemistry and materials science. Recently, several equivariant message passing neural networks (MPNNs) have been shown to outperform models built using other approaches in terms of accuracy. However, most MPNNs suffer from high computational cost and poor scalability. We propose that these limitations arise because MPNNs only pass two-body messages leading to a direct relationship between the number of layers and the expressivity of the network. In this work, we introduce MACE, a new equivariant MPNN model that uses higher body order messages. In particular, we show that using four-body messages reduces the required number of message passing iterations to just two, resulting in a fast and highly parallelizable model, reaching or exceeding state-of-the-art accuracy on the rMD17, 3BPA, and AcAc benchmark tasks. We also demonstrate that using higher order messages leads to an improved steepness of the learning curves.

stat.ML↗