Learning mappings between equilibrium states of liquid systems using normalizing flows

Author(s)
Alessandro Coretti, Sebastian Falkner, Phillip L. Geissler, Christoph Dellago
Abstract

Generative models and, in particular, normalizing flows are a promising tool in statistical mechanics to address the sampling problem in condensed-matter systems. In this work, we investigate the potential of normalizing flows to learn a transformation to map different liquid systems into each other while allowing at the same time to obtain an unbiased equilibrium distribution. We apply this methodology to the mapping of a small system of fully repulsive disks modeled via the Weeks-Chandler-Andersen potential into a Lennard-Jones system in the liquid phase at different coordinates in the phase diagram. We obtain an improvement in the relative effective sample size of the generated distribution up to a factor of six compared to direct reweighting. We show that this factor can have a strong dependency on the thermodynamic parameters of the source and target system.

Organisation(s)
Computational and Soft Matter Physics
External organisation(s)
Universität Augsburg, University of California, Berkeley
Journal
Journal of Chemical Physics
Volume
162
No. of pages
12
ISSN
0021-9606
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.10420
Publication date
05-2025
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103043 Computational physics, 103006 Chemical physics, 103029 Statistical physics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
General Physics and Astronomy, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/1273fb37-12e1-4b51-a8b2-5f44674cc968