- Open Access
lattice gauge theories with physics-informed neural networks
Phys. Rev. D 113, 054511 – Published 26 March, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/mb67-9rkf
Abstract
We present an application of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to the study of lattice gauge theories. Our method enables the learning of eigenfunctions and eigenvalues at arbitrary gauge couplings, smoothly moving from the analytically known strong-coupling regime toward weaker couplings. By encoding the Schrödinger equation and the symmetries of the eigenstates directly into the loss function, the network performs an unsupervised exploration of the spectrum. We validate the approach on the single-plaquette U(1) and SU(2) pure-gauge theories, showing that the PINNs successfully reproduce the hierarchy of energy levels and their corresponding wave functions.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Article Text
References (49)
- Christof Gattringer and Christian Lang, Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice—an Introductory Presentation (Springer Science & Business Media, New York, 2009), Vol. 788, 10.1007/978-3-642-01850-3.
- Thomas A. Degrand and Carleton DeTar, Lattice Methods for Quantum Chromodynamics (World Scientific, Singapore, 2006), 10.1142/6065.
- Y. Aoki et al., FLAG review 2024, Phys. Rev. D 113, 014508 (2026).
- Christof Gattringer and Kurt Langfeld, Approaches to the sign problem in lattice field theory, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 31, 1643007 (2016).
- Martin Luscher and Stefan Schaefer, Lattice QCD without topology barriers, J. High Energy Phys. 07 (2011) 036.
- Lukas Mazur, Topological aspects in lattice QCD, Ph.D. thesis, Bielefeld U., 2021, 10.4119/unibi/2956493.
- Stefan Schaefer, Rainer Sommer, and Francesco Virotta, Critical slowing down and error analysis in lattice QCD simulations, Nucl. Phys. B845, 93 (2011).
- Guido Cossu et al., Testing algorithms for critical slowing down, EPJ Web Conf. 175, 02008 (2018).
- J. J. Sakurai and Jim Napolitano, Modern Quantum Mechanics. 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2017).
- Lena Funcke et al., Review on quantum computing for lattice field theory, Proc. Sci., LATTICE2022 (2023) 228.
- Giuseppe Magnifico et al., Tensor networks for lattice gauge theories beyond one dimension, Commun. Phys. 8, 322 (2025).
- Salvatore Cuomo, Vincenzo Schiano Di Cola, Fabio Giampaolo, Gianluigi Rozza, Maziar Raissi, and Francesco Piccialli, Scientific machine learning through physics–informed neural networks: Where we are and what’s next, J. Sci. Comput. 92, 88 (2022).
- Ben Moseley, Andrew Markham, and Tarje Nissen-Meyer, Solving the wave equation with physics-informed deep learning, arXiv:2006.11894.
- N. E. Ligterink, N. R. Walet, and R. F. Bishop, Towards a many body treatment of Hamiltonian lattice SU(N) gauge theory, Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 284, 215 (2000).
- Julian Bender, Patrick Emonts, Erez Zohar, and J. Ignacio Cirac, Real-time dynamics in compact QED using complex periodic Gaussian states, Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 043145 (2020).
- Ryu Sasaki, Exactly solvable quantum mechanics, Universe 2, 2 (2014), arXiv:1411.2703.
- Michael E Peskin, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2018).
- John B. Kogut, An introduction to lattice gauge theory and spin systems, Rev. Mod. Phys. 51, 659 (1979).
- John Kogut and Leonard Susskind, Hamiltonian formulation of Wilson’s lattice gauge theories, Phys. Rev. D 11, 395 (1975).
- M. Luscher, Some analytic results concerning the mass spectrum of Yang-Mills gauge theories on a torus, Nucl. Phys. B219, 233 (1983).
- Manu Mathur, The loop states in lattice gauge theories, Phys. Lett. B 640, 292 (2006).
- Manu Mathur, Loop approach to lattice gauge theories, Nucl. Phys. B779, 32 (2007).
- Greg Ashton et al., Nested sampling for physical scientists, Nature (London) 2, 39 (2022).
- T. Kanwar, S. Romiti, and U.Wenger, Nested sampling for first order phase transitions, https://conference.ippp.dur.ac.uk/event/1265/contributions/7617/.
- Midhun T Augustine, A survey on universal approximation theorems, arXiv:2407.12895.
- Henry Jin, Marios Mattheakis, and Pavlos Protopapas, Unsupervised neural networks for quantum eigenvalue problems, arXiv:2010.05075.
- Henry Jin, Marios Mattheakis, and Pavlos Protopapas, Physics-informed neural networks for quantum eigenvalue problems, in 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) (IEEE, 2022), pp. 1–8, 10.48550/arXiv.2203.00451.
- Elliott G. Holliday, John F. Lindner, and William L. Ditto, Solving quantum billiard eigenvalue problems with physics-informed machine learning, AIP Adv. 13, 085013 (2023).
- Julián Fernández Bonder and Ariel M Salort, A PINNs approach for the computation of eigenvalues in elliptic problems, arXiv:2507.03126.
- Conor Rowan et al., Solving engineering eigenvalue problems with neural networks using the Rayleigh quotient, arXiv:2506.04375.
- Stephen Hanson and Lorien Pratt, Comparing biases for minimal network construction with back-propagation, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, edited by D. Touretzky (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1988), Vol. 1, https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper-files/paper/1988/file/1c9ac0159c94d8d0cbedc973445af2da-Paper.pdf.
- Ilya Loshchilov and Frank Hutter, Decoupled weight decay regularization, arXiv:1711.05101.
- Adam Paszke et al., Pytorch: An imperative style, high-performance deep learning library, Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 32, (2019).
- Lorenzo Brigato and Stavroula Mougiakakou, Tune without validation: Searching for learning rate andweight decay on training sets, arXiv:2403.05532.
- https://github.com/simone-romiti/adiabatic_PINNs-suN.
- Harald J. W. Müller-Kirsten. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: Schrödinger Equation and Path Integral (World Scientific, Singapore, 2012).
- Milton Abramowitz and Irene A Stegun, Handbook of Mathematical Functions (Dover Publications, New York, 1965), p. 361.
- D. Robson and D. M. Webber, Gauge theories on a small lattice, Z. Phys. C 7, 53 (1980).
- Edmund Taylor Whittaker and George Neville Watson, A Course of Modern Analysis (Courier Dover Publications, New York, 2020).
- Irian D’Andrea, Christian W. Bauer, Dorota M. Grabowska, and Marat Freytsis et al., New basis for Hamiltonian SU(2) simulations, Phys. Rev. D 109, 074501 (2024).
- https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/208222.
- https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10003675.
- https://www.id.unibe.ch/hpc.
- Michael Creutz, Gauge fixing, the transfer matrix, and confinement on a lattice, Phys. Rev. D 15, 1128 (1977).
- Simone Romiti and Carsten Urbach, Digitizing lattice gauge theories in the magnetic basis: Reducing the breaking of the fundamental commutation relations, Eur. Phys. J. C 84, 708 (2024).
- Leonard Susskind, Lattice models of quark confinement at high temperature, Phys. Rev. D 20, 2610 (1979).
- T. Banks, S. Raby, L. Susskind, J. Kogut, D. R. T. Jones, P. N. Scharbach, and D. K. Sinclair, Strong-coupling calculations of the hadron spectrum of quantum chromodynamics, Phys. Rev. D 15, 1111 (1977).
- Manu Mathur and T. P. Sreeraj, Canonical transformations and loop formulation of SU(N) lattice gauge theories, Phys. Rev. D 92, 125018 (2015).
- Timo Jakobs, Marco Garofalo, Tobias Hartung, Karl Jansen, Johann Ostmeyer, Dominik Rolfes, Simone Romiti, Carsten Urbach, Canonical momenta in digitized SU(2) lattice gauge theory: Definition and free theory, Eur. Phys. J. C 83, 669 (2023).