Neural Wavefunction Calculations of {\mu}SR Spectra with Quantum Muons and Protons

TL;DR

This paper employs neural network-based quantum Monte Carlo methods to accurately compute muon hyperfine constants, demonstrating improvements over traditional DFT approaches by explicitly including quantum effects of muons.

Contribution

It introduces a neural network variational quantum Monte Carlo approach for calculating muon hyperfine constants, explicitly treating muons quantum mechanically for the first time.

Findings

Quantum muon calculations yield hyperfine constants closer to experimental values.

DFT results significantly differ from quantum calculations, indicating limitations of classical treatment.

Explicit quantum treatment improves prediction accuracy of muon-electron interactions.

Abstract

Accurate prediction of muon hyperfine constants is useful for interpreting muon spin spectroscopy data, yet standard methods such as density functional theory (DFT) compute muon-electron pair density functions, and thus hyperfine constants, by treating the muon as a fixed classical particle. This work uses the variational quantum Monte Carlo method with neural-network trial wavefunctions, a highly accurate and flexible approach recently applied to other quantum chemical problems. The muon can be treated classically or included in the many-particle electron-muon wavefunction, in which case the fully quantum mechanical pair density is obtained directly. We calculate muon hyperfine constants in muoniated methyl and ethyl radicals for both quantum mechanical and fixed classical muons. The hyperfine constants obtained from our fixed-muon calculations in the methyl and ethyl radicals differ from the corresponding DFT results significantly, highlighting the limitations of DFT even when the muon is treated classically. The results with quantum muons are closer to experiment after accounting for environmental effects. These findings suggest that explicitly calculating the quantum mechanical muon-electron pair density improves the accuracy of muon hyperfine constant predictions.