Deep Potential Molecular Dynamics: a scalable model with the accuracy of quantum mechanics

We introduce a new scheme for molecular simulations, based on a many-body potential and interatomic forces generated by a deep neural network trained with ab initio data. We show that the proposed scheme, which we call Deep Potential Molecular Dynamics (DeePMD), provides an efficient and accurate protocol in a variety of systems, including bulk materials and molecules. In all these cases, DeePMD gives results that are essentially indistinguishable from the original data, at a cost that scales linearly with system size. Moreover, in a few test cases, DeePMD shows good structural transferability to thermodynamic conditions not included in the original training data.