Wednesday·July 29, 2020

[Submitted on 28 Jul 2020]

Variational Monte Carlo calculations of $\mathbf{A}\le 4$ nuclei with an artificial neural-network correlator ansatz

Corey Adams🇺🇸 · Giuseppe Carleo🇺🇸 · Alessandro Lovato🇮🇹 · Noemi Rocco🇺🇸

The complexity of many-body quantum wave functions is a central aspect of several fields of physics and chemistry where non-perturbative interactions are prominent. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have proven to be a flexible tool to approximate quantum many-body states in condensed matter and chemistry problems. In this work we introduce a neural-network quantum state ansatz to model the ground-state wave function of light nuclei, and approximately solve the nuclear many-body Schrödinger equation. Using efficient stochastic sampling and optimization schemes, our approach extends pioneering applications of ANNs in the field, which present exponentially-scaling algorithmic complexity. We compute the binding energies and point-nucleon densities of $A\le 4$ nuclei as emerging from a leading-order pionless effective field theory Hamiltonian. We successfully benchmark the ANN wave function against more conventional parametrizations based on two- and three-body Jastrow functions, and virtually-exact Green's function Monte Carlo results.