Adapting reservoir computing to solve the Schr\"odinger equation

Abstract

Reservoir computing is a machine learning algorithm that excels at predicting the evolution of time series, in particular, dynamical systems. Moreover, it has also shown superb performance at solving partial differential equations. In this work, we adapt this methodology to integrate the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation, propagating an initial wavefunction in time. Since such wavefunctions are complex-valued high-dimensional arrays the reservoir computing formalism needs to be extended to cope with complex-valued data. Furthermore, we propose a multi-step learning strategy that avoids overfitting the training data. We illustrate the performance of our adapted reservoir computing method by application to four standard problems in molecular vibrational dynamics.