Equivariant electronic Hamiltonian prediction with many-body message passing

Abstract Machine learning surrogate models of Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory Hamiltonians provide a powerful tool for accelerating the prediction of electronic properties of materials, such as electronic band structures and density of states. For large-scale applications, an ideal model would exhibit high generalization ability and computational efficiency. Here, we introduce the MACE-H graph neural network, which combines high body-order message passing with a node-order expansion to efficiently obtain all relevant O(3) irreducible representations. The model achieves high accuracy and computational efficiency and captures the full local chemical environment features of, currently, up to f orbital matrix interaction blocks. We demonstrate the model’s accuracy and transferability on several open materials benchmark datasets of two-dimensional materials and a new dataset for bulk gold, achieving sub-meV prediction errors on matrix elements and high accuracy on eigenvalues across all systems. We further analyze the interplay of high-body-order message passing and locality that makes this model a good candidate for high-throughput material screening.