Eigenvector continuation as an efficient and accurate emulator for uncertainty quantification
Journal article, 2020

First principles calculations of atomic nuclei based on microscopic nuclear forces derived from chiral effective field theory (EFT) have blossomed in the past years. A key element of such ab initio studies is the understanding and quantification of systematic and statistical errors arising from the omission of higher-order terms in the chiral expansion as well as the model calibration. While there has been significant progress in analyzing theoretical uncertainties for nucleon-nucleon scattering observables, the generalization to multi-nucleon systems has not been feasible yet due to the high computational cost of evaluating observables for a large set of low-energy couplings. In this Letter we show that a new method called eigenvector continuation (EC) can be used for constructing an efficient and accurate emulator for nuclear many-body observables, thereby enabling uncertainty quantification in multi-nucleon systems. We demonstrate the power of EC emulation with a proof-of-principle calculation that lays out all correlations between bulk ground-state observables in the few-nucleon sector. On the basis of ab initio calculations for the ground-state energy and radius in 4 He, we demonstrate that EC is more accurate and efficient compared to established methods like Gaussian processes.

Author

S. Koenig

Technische Universität Darmstadt

North Carolina State University

Helmholtz

Andreas Ekström

Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics

K. Hebeler

Helmholtz

Technische Universität Darmstadt

D. Lee

Michigan State University

A. Schwenk

Helmholtz

Technische Universität Darmstadt

Max Planck Society

Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics

0370-2693 (ISSN)

Vol. 810 135814

Strong interactions for precision nuclear physics (PrecisionNuclei)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/758027), 2018-02-01 -- 2023-01-31.

Subject Categories

Computational Mathematics

Other Physics Topics

Theoretical Chemistry

DOI

10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135814

More information

Latest update

2/25/2022