Machine learning nonequilibrium phase transitions in charge-density wave insulators

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Authors: Yunhao Fan, Sheng Zhang, Gia-Wei Chern
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Nonequilibrium electronic forces play a central role in voltage-driven phase transitions but are notoriously expensive to evaluate in dynamical simulations. Here we develop a machine learning framework for adiabatic lattice dynamics coupled to nonequilibrium electrons, and demonstrate it for a gating induced insulator to metal transition out of a charge density wave state in the Holstein model. Although exact electronic forces can be obtained from nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) calculations, their high computational cost renders long time dynamical simulations prohibitively expensive. By exploiting the locality of the electronic response, we train a neural network to directly predict instantaneous local electronic forces from the lattice configuration, thereby bypassing repeated NEGF calculations during time evolution. When combined with Brownian dynamics, the resulting machine learning force field quantitatively reproduces domain wall motion and nonequilibrium phase transition dynamics obtained from full NEGF simulations, while achieving orders of magnitude gains in computational efficiency. Our results establish direct force learning as an efficient and accurate approach for simulating nonequilibrium lattice dynamics in driven quantum materials.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Machine Learning in Materials Science Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism Quantum many-body systems

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
12 January 2026
Document type
Preprint