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At least 1,783 records · Page 99

VOTCA: multiscale frameworks for quantum and classical simulations in soft matter

Many physical phenomena in liquids and soft matter are multiscale by nature and can involve processes with quantum and classical degrees of freedom occurring over a vast range of length- and timescales. Examples range from structure formation processes of complex polymers or even polymer blends (Svaneborg & Everaers, 2023) on the classical side to charge and energy transport and conversion processes (Lee et al., 2019) involving explicit electronic and, therefore, quantum information. The Versatile Object-oriented Toolkit for Coarse-graining Applications (VOTCA) provides multiscale frameworks built on a comprehensive set of methods for the development of classical coarse-grained potentials (VOTCA-CSG) as well as state-of-the art excited state electronic structure methods based on density-functional and many-body Green’s function theories, coupled in mixed quantum-classical models and used in kinetic network models (VOTCA-XTP).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Modeling Material Interfaces with the Six-Equation Model in FLEXO

FLEXO is a multiphysics code developed at Sandia National Laboratories for predictive simulation of pulsed power target physics with extended magnetohydrodynamics modeling. Given this application space, FLEXO must be able to perform high-fidelity simulations of pulsed-power systems that include multiple materials. This work presents the augmentation of FLEXO with a six-equation model for multimaterial flow. We design and analyze discretizations of the six-equation model, emphasizing desirable properties for robust multimaterial simulation. We also present solution limiting, bounds preservation, and pressure equilibration/relaxation techniques that enhance the robustness of the overall multimaterial scheme. We present a suite of test problems to document these new capabilities of the FLEXO code.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DRiFT - Release 1.1.1: Organic Scintillators

DRiFT (a Detector Response Function Toolkit) is LANL-developed software that postprocesses output from the extensively validated radiation transport code, MCNP, and generates realistic nuclear instrumentation response. DRiFT is designed to be flexible, enabling users to specify detector type and many experimental settings, as well as accommodating the addition of their own desired features. Although DRiFT development has included scintillator, gas, and semiconductor features, the focus of this release is on organic scintillator and associated capabilities. Organic scintillators are widely used in the areas of nuclear safeguards and nuclear non-proliferation efforts. DRiFT has several diagnostic and detector physics features relevant to detailed scintillator simulations including: tracking source particle information, scintillation light production, the effects of PMT quantum efficiency and gain, and digitizer settings. Users can select responses from many scintillator and PMT types supported natively by DRiFT, or add their own by following the instructions in this document. We acknowledge that DRiFT is under active development, bug reports and general questions and comments should be directed to Madison Andrews, madison@lanl.gov. This manual is divided into four parts: I) An overview of DRiFT, including how to obtain and install the executable, II) A description of the detector physics related to scintillators available, III) a description of more general DRiFT features the user may find useful, and IV) a description of the test suite and examples made available with the code release.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

QuantumNAT: quantum noise-aware training with noise injection, quantization and normalization

Parameterized Quantum Circuits (PQC) are promising towards quantum advantage on near-term quantum hardware. However, due to the large quantum noises (errors), the performance of PQC models has a severe degradation on real quantum devices. Take Quantum Neural Network (QNN) as an example, the accuracy gap between noise-free simulation and noisy results on IBMQ-Yorktown for MNIST-4 classification is over 60%. Existing noise mitigation methods are general ones without leveraging unique characteristics of PQC; on the other hand, existing PQC work does not consider noise effect. To this end, we present QuantumNAT, a PQC-specific framework to perform noise-aware optimizations in both training and inference stages to improve robustness. We experimentally observe that the effect of quantum noise to PQC measurement outcome is a linear map from noise-free outcome with a scaling and a shift factor. Motivated by that, we propose post-measurement normalization to mitigate the feature distribution differences between noise-free and noisy scenarios. Furthermore, to improve the robustness against noise, we propose noise injection to the training process by inserting quantum error gates to PQC according to realistic noise models of quantum hardware. Lastly, post-measurement quantization is introduced to quantize the measurement outcomes to discrete values, achieving the denoising effect. Extensive experiments on 8 classification tasks using 6 quantum devices demonstrate that QuantumNAT improves accuracy by up to 43%, and achieves over 94% 2-class, 80% 4-class, and 34% 10-class classification accuracy measured on real quantum computers. The code for construction and noise-aware training of PQC is available in the TorchQuantum library.

Wang, Hanrui↗

Radiative and Nonradiative Recombinations in Organic Radical Emitters: The Effect of Guest–Host Interactions

Radical-carrying organic molecules have received significant attention to bypass the issue related to harvesting triplet excitons in current light-emitting materials. While the computational efforts conducted so far have treated these radical emitters as isolated entities, in actual devices, they are embedded in a host matrix and subject to emitter–host interactions. In this study, by combining molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations, the impact of the host matrix on the optoelectronic performance of radical emitters is evaluated, taking as a representative example the (4-ncarbazolyl-2,6-dichlorophenyl)bis(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)-methyl (TTM-3NCz) radical emitter dispersed in a 4,4-bis(carbazol-9-yl)biphenyl (CBP) host. A morphological analysis shows that steric effects around the radical centers, carried by the TTM electron-poor moieties of the emitters, disfavor π–π interactions with the host molecules, which leads to random intermolecular orientations around the TTM moieties. The 3NCz electron-rich moieties of the emitters, however, have much lesser spatial hindrance for intermolecular π–π stacking, which modulates the structural and electronic properties of the emitters in the host matrix. The influence of dynamic and static disorders on the radiative and nonradiative recombination processes is also investigated and it is found that the rates of nonradiative recombination are small, which opens the way to 100% internal quantum efficiency for the doublet-based emission process.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Review of the first charged-particle transport coefficient comparison workshop

We present the results of the first Charged-Particle Transport Coefficient Code Comparison Workshop, which was held in Albuquerque, NM October 4–6, 2016. In this first workshop, scientists from eight institutions and four countries gathered to compare calculations of transport coefficients including thermal and electrical conduction, electron–ion coupling, inter-ion diffusion, ion viscosity, and charged particle stopping powers. In this paper, we give general background on Coulomb coupling and computational expense, review where some transport coefficients appear in hydrodynamic equations, and present the submitted data. Large variations are found when either the relevant Coulomb coupling parameter is large or computational expense causes difficulties. Understanding the general accuracy and uncertainty associated with such transport coefficients is important for quantifying errors in hydrodynamic simulations of inertial confinement fusion and high-energy density experiments.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Computational and experimental study of different brines in temperature swing solvent extraction desalination with amine solvents

Rapid global urbanization and high-salinity wastewater disposal from industrial activities have exerted significant pressure on water resources. Over the past few years, temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE) has been identified as a promising technique to desalinate hypersaline brines. Despite its potential, the TSSE desalination literature has been mainly based on empirical insights, and the limited molecular simulation studies have primarily focused on NaCl brines. Herein, we use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to study the TSSE desalination of four different brines, namely, KCl, KBr, NaCl, and NaBr using diisopropylamine as the solvent. Based on both bulk and interfacial brine-diisopropylamine MD results, here we investigate the qualitative and quantitative performance of the simulations by benchmarking these results against our experimental evaluations of these same systems. MD results provide satisfactory qualitative agreement with the experimental data of water solubilization in the organic phase and amine solubilization in the aqueous phase for the KBr, KCl, and NaBr brines. Also, the molecular mechanism of solvation of ionic species by water molecules over diisopropylamine suggested by the MD simulations is in agreement with our experimental data. However, larger qualitative and quantitative deviations were observed for the NaCl brines, and this is likely due to polarization and charge transfer effects, as quantified by our quantum chemical calculations.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Machine learning applied to classifying neutron resonances

The performance of nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems depends on a precise understanding of the neutron interaction cross sections for materials used in these systems. These cross sections exhibit resonance structure whose shape is determined in part by the angular momentum quantum numbers of the resonances. The correct assignment of the quantum numbers of neutron resonances is therefore of paramount importance. In this project, we apply a machine learning technique, namely decision trees, to automate the quantum number assignments. The tree is trained from simulated data generated to mimic the errors found in real data. We explore the use of several physics-motivated features for training our trees, including the nearest neighbor spacing distribution, cumulative level distribution, and channel width distributions. Initial results using random matrix theory motivated fits which demonstrated that we can determine resonance spin groups somewhat reliably. If we use these fits as features in our trees, we can train them to spot outliers corresponding to misassigned resonances. We found that with the large number of features used in this project that the decision tree tended to over t training data resulting in poor performance with respect to the test data. By reducing the number of features, we can achieve nearly perfect assignment of quantum numbers with our training data.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

QuantumScents: Quantum-Mechanical Properties for 3.5k Olfactory Molecules

Quantitative structure–odor relationships are critically important for studies related to the function of olfaction. Current literature data sets contain expert-labeled molecules but lack feature data. This paper introduces QuantumScents, a quantum mechanics augmented derivative of the Leffingwell data set. QuantumScents contains 3.5k structurally and chemically diverse molecules ranging from 2 to 30 heavy atoms (CNOS) and their corresponding 3D coordinates, total PBE0 energy, molecular dipole moment, and per-atom Hirshfeld charges, dipoles, and ratios. The authors demonstrate that Hirshfeld charges and ratios contain sufficient information to perform molecular classification by training a Message Passing Neural Network with chemprop (Heid, E.; et al. ChemRxiv, 2023, DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv-2023-3zcfl) to predict scent labels. Finally, the QuantumScents data set is freely available on Zenodo along with the authors’ code, example models, and data set generation workflow (https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8239853).

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Transition from sub-Rayleigh anticrack to supershear crack propagation in snow avalanches

Snow slab avalanches, characterized by a distinct, broad fracture line, are released following anticrack propagation in highly porous weak snow layers buried below cohesive slabs. The anticrack mechanism is driven by the volumetric collapse of the weak layer, which leads to the closure of crack faces and to the onset of frictional contact. Here, on the basis of snow fracture experiments, full-scale avalanche measurements and numerical simulations, we report the existence of a transition from sub-Rayleigh anticrack to supershear crack propagation. This transition follows the Burridge–Andrews mechanism, in which a supershear daughter crack nucleates ahead of the main fracture front and eventually propagates faster than the shear wave speed. Furthermore, we show that the supershear propagation regime can exist even if the shear-to-normal stress ratio is lower than the static friction coefficient as a result of the loss of frictional resistance during collapse. This finding shows that snow slab avalanches have fundamental similarities with strike-slip earthquakes.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Extended Lagrangian Born–Oppenheimer molecular dynamics using a Krylov subspace approximation

It is shown how the electronic equations of motion in extended Lagrangian Born–Oppenheimer molecular dynamics simulations can be integrated using low-rank approximations of the inverse Jacobian kernel. This kernel determines the metric tensor in the harmonic oscillator extension of the Lagrangian that drives the evolution of the electronic degrees of freedom. The proposed kernel approximation is derived from a pseudoinverse of a low-rank estimate of the Jacobian, which is expressed in terms of a generalized set of directional derivatives with directions that are given from a Krylov subspace approximation. The approach allows a tunable and adaptive approximation that can take advantage of efficient preconditioning techniques. The proposed kernel approximation for the integration of the electronic equations of motion makes it possible to apply extended Lagrangian first-principles molecular dynamics simulations to a broader range of problems, including reactive chemical systems with numerically sensitive and unsteady charge solutions. This can be achieved without requiring exact full calculations of the inverse Jacobian kernel in each time step or relying on iterative non-linear self-consistent field optimization of the electronic ground state prior to the force evaluations as in regular direct Born–Oppenheimer molecular dynamics. We note the low-rank approximation of the Jacobian is directly related to Broyden’s class of quasi-Newton algorithms and Jacobian-free Newton–Krylov methods and provides a complementary formulation for the solution of nonlinear systems of equations.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Overview of the Graphical User Interface for the GERMcode (GCR Event-Based Risk Model)

The descriptions of biophysical events from heavy ions are of interest in radiobiology, cancer therapy, and space exploration. The biophysical description of the passage of heavy ions in tissue and shielding materials is best described by a stochastic approach that includes both ion track structure and nuclear interactions. A new computer model called the GCR Event-based Risk Model (GERM) code was developed for the description of biophysical events from heavy ion beams at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL). The GERMcode calculates basic physical and biophysical quantities of high-energy protons and heavy ions that have been studied at NSRL for the purpose of simulating space radiobiological effects. For mono-energetic beams, the code evaluates the linear-energy transfer (LET), range (R), and absorption in tissue equivalent material for a given Charge (Z), Mass Number (A) and kinetic energy (E) of an ion. In addition, a set of biophysical properties are evaluated such as the Poisson distribution of ion or delta-ray hits for a specified cellular area, cell survival curves, and mutation and tumor probabilities. The GERMcode also calculates the radiation transport of the beam line for either a fixed number of user-specified depths or at multiple positions along the Bragg curve of the particle. The contributions from primary ion and nuclear secondaries are evaluated. The GERMcode accounts for the major nuclear interaction processes of importance for describing heavy ion beams, including nuclear fragmentation, elastic scattering, and knockout-cascade processes by using the quantum multiple scattering fragmentation (QMSFRG) model. The QMSFRG model has been shown to be in excellent agreement with available experimental data for nuclear fragmentation cross sections, and has been used by the GERMcode for application to thick target experiments. The GERMcode provides scientists participating in NSRL experiments with the data needed for the interpretation of their experiments, including the ability to model the beam line, the shielding of samples and sample holders, and the estimates of basic physical and biological outputs of the designed experiments. We present an overview of the GERMcode GUI, as well as providing training applications.

Kim, Myung-Hee Y.↗

Molecular dynamics on quantum annealers

Abstract In this work we demonstrate a practical prospect of using quantum annealers for simulation of molecular dynamics. A methodology developed for this goal, dubbed Quantum Differential Equations (QDE), is applied to propagate classical trajectories for the vibration of the hydrogen molecule in several regimes: nearly harmonic, highly anharmonic, and dissociative motion. The results obtained using the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer are all consistent and quickly converge to the analytical reference solution. Several alternative strategies for such calculations are explored and it was found that the most accurate results and the best efficiency are obtained by combining the quantum annealer with classical post-processing (greedy algorithm). Importantly, the QDE framework developed here is entirely general and can be applied to solve any system of first-order ordinary nonlinear differential equations using a quantum annealer.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗

Efficient simulation of low-temperature physics in one-dimensional gapless systems

Here, we discuss the computational efficiency of the finite-temperature simulation with minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS). To argue that METTS can be efficiently represented as matrix product states, we present an analytic upper bound for the average entanglement Rényi entropy of METTS for a Rényi index 0 < q ≤ 1. In particular, for one-dimensional (1D) gapless systems described by conformal field theories, the upper bound scales as O⁡(cN 0 ⁢log⁡β) where c is the central charge and N is the system size. Furthermore, we numerically find that the average Rényi entropy exhibits a universal behavior characterized by the central charge and is roughly given by half of the analytic upper bound. Based on these results, we show that METTS can provide a speedup compared to employing the purification method to analyze thermal equilibrium states at low temperatures in 1D gapless systems.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Machine-learning-based inversion of nuclear responses

A microscopic description of the interaction of atomic nuclei with external electroweak probes is required for elucidating aspects of short-range nuclear dynamics and for the correct interpretation of neutrino oscillation experiments. Nuclear quantum Monte Carlo methods infer the nuclear electroweak response functions from their Laplace transforms. Inverting the Laplace transform is a notoriously ill-posed problem; and Bayesian techniques, such as maximum entropy, are typically used to reconstruct the original response functions in the quasielastic region. In this work, we present a physics-informed artificial neural network architecture suitable for approximating the inverse of the Laplace transform. Utilizing simulated, albeit realistic, electromagnetic response functions, we show that this physics-informed artificial neural network outperforms maximum entropy in both the low-energy transfer and the quasielastic regions, thereby allowing for robust calculations of electron scattering and neutrino scattering on nuclei and inclusive muon capture rates.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Many-body reactive force field development for carbon condensation in C/O systems under extreme conditions

In this paper, we describe the development of a reactive force field for C/O systems under extreme temperatures and pressures, based on the many-body Chebyshev Interaction Model for Efficient Simulation (ChIMES). The resulting model, which targets carbon condensation under thermodynamic conditions of 6500 K and 2.5 g cm –3 , affords a balance between model accuracy, complexity, and training set generation expense. We show that the model recovers much of the accuracy of density functional theory for the prediction of structure, dynamics, and chemistry when applied to dissociative condensed phase systems at 1:1 and 1:2 C:O ratios, as well as molten carbon. Our C/O modeling approach exhibits a 104 increase in efficiency for the same system size (i.e., 128 atoms) and a linear system size scalability over standard quantum molecular dynamics methods, allowing the simulation of significantly larger systems than previously possible. We find that the model captures the condensed-phase reaction-coupled formation of carbon clusters implied by recent experiments, and that this process is susceptible to strong finite size effects. Overall, we find the present ChIMES model to be well suited for studying chemical processes and cluster formation at pressures and temperatures typical of shock waves. We expect that the present C/O modeling paradigm can serve as a template for the development of a broader high pressure–high temperature force-field for condensed phase chemistry in organic materials.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Simulation of GaN-based light emitting diodes incorporating composition fluctuation effects

III-Nitride light emitting diodes (LEDs) are widely used in a range of high efficiency lighting and display applications, which has enabled significant energy savings in the last decade. Despite the wide application of GaN LEDs, transport mechanisms across InGaN/GaN heterostructures in these devices are not well explained. Fixed polarization sheet charges at InGaN/GaN interfaces lead to large interface dipole charges, which create large potential barriers to overcome. One-dimensional models for transport across such heterostructures predict turn-on voltages that are significantly higher than that found in real devices. As a result, conventional models for transport cannot predict the performance of new designs such as for longer wavelength LEDs or for multi-quantum well LEDs. In this work, we show that incorporating low and high indium compositions within quantum wells at the submicrometer scale can provide an accurate prediction of the characteristics of GaN/InGaN light emitting diodes.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Quantum criticality using a superconducting quantum processor

Quantum criticality emerges from the collective behavior of many interacting quantum particles, often at the transition between different phases of matter. It is one of the cornerstones of condensed matter physics, which we access on noisy intermediate-scale (NISQ) quantum devices by leveraging a dynamically driven phenomenon. Here we probe the critical properties of the one-dimensional quantum Ising model on a programmable superconducting quantum chip via a Kibble-Zurek process, obtain scaling laws, and estimate critical exponents despite inherent sources of errors on the hardware. In addition, we investigate how the improvement of NISQ computers (more qubits, less noise) will consolidate the computation of those universal physical properties. A one-parameter noise model captures the effect of imperfections and reproduces the experimental data. Its systematic study reveals that the noise, analogously to temperature, induces a new length scale in the system. We introduce and successfully verify modified scaling laws, directly accounting for the noise without any prior knowledge. It makes data analyses for extracting physical properties transparent to noise. By understanding how imperfect quantum hardware modifies the genuine properties of quantum states of matter, we enhance the power of NISQ processors considerably for addressing quantum criticality and potentially other phenomena and algorithms.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗