Google proposes new method to derive analytical expressions for terms in quantum mechanics…

It's no news that the giant Alphabet invests quite a lot in ML applications to science, through channels such as Google Research and Deepmind. While in the fields of chemistry and biology AlphaFold is by far its most famous project, Deepmind has also gone into quantum mechanical (QM) calculations (my blog entry here), and so is doing Google Research. QM calculations are very important in chemistry, as they provide the highest level of detail about electron densities, distributions, and spin states in molecules and materials, all the key elements required to model, understand, and predict their chemical reactivity and physicochemical properties -none of which are approachable with classical methods. The new work I comment on here comes from Google Research and also addresses ways to improve QM calculations. Specifically, Ma et al developed a new method to derive symbolic, analytical forms of DFT functionals.