Making the Coupled Cluster Correlation Energy Machine-Learnable

Calculating the electronic structure of molecules and solids has become an important pillar of modern research in diverse fields of research from biology and materials science to chemistry and physics. Unfortunately, increasingly accurate and thus reliable approximate solution schemes to the underlying Schrödinger equation scale steeply in computational cost, rendering most accurate approaches like “gold standard” coupled cluster theory, CC, quickly intractable for larger systems of interest. Here we show that this scaling can be significantly reduced by applying machine-learning to the CC correlation energy. We introduce a vector-based representation of CC wave functions and use potential energy surfaces of a small molecule test set to learn the correlation energy from this representation. Our results show that the CC correlation energy can be efficiently learned, even when the representation is constructed from approximate amplitudes provided by computationally less demanding Møller–Plesset (MP2) perturbation theory. Exploiting existing linear scaling MP2 implementations, this potentially opens the door to CC-quality molecular dynamics simulations