
Rediscovery of Numerical L¨uscher’s Formula from the Neural Network
Yu Lu,1, ∗Yi-Jia Wang,1, †Ying Chen,1, 2, ‡and Jia-Jun Wu1, §
1School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing 100049, China
2Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
We present that by predicting the spectrum in discrete space from the phase shift in continuous
space, the neural network can remarkably reproduce the numerical L¨uscher’s formula to a high
precision. The model-independent property of the L¨uscher’s formula is naturally realized by the
generalizability of the neural network. This exhibits the great potential of the neural network
to extract model-independent relation between model-dependent quantities, and this data-driven
approach could greatly facilitate the discovery of the physical principles underneath the intricate
data.
I. INTRODUCTION
Physicists are always going after a concise description
of data. Generally, this concise description boils down to
analytic expressions or conserved quantities, which are
usually dodging and hiding and cannot be trapped easily.
Nowadays the rapid progress of machine learning (ML)
techniques are helping physicists to meet their goals, as
manifested by the applications, such as AI Feynman[1,2]
and AI Poincar´e [3,4]. For a review of ML techniques in
physics, see [5] and several applications in hadron physics
in Refs. [6–12] and references therein.
In most cases of modern physics, a concise description
is generally realized at more abstract levels, such as ana-
lytic differential or integral equations whose solutions are
supposed to explain the data. If these equations are ex-
plicitly known but cannot be solved easily even through
numerical methods, ML may help to work out the solu-
tions through Physics-informed-neural-network (PINN)
approach[13]. In a more challenging case that there are
conceptually links between physical principles and real-
istic phenomena but we cannot write down the exact ex-
pressions, maybe we can also resort to the data driven
ML for uncovering the underneath connections.
A typical example is the study of the strong interaction
in the low energy regime. It is known that the properties
of hadrons are necessarily dictated by quantum chromo-
dynmics (QCD), the fundamental theory of the strong
interactions. However, due to the unique self-interacting
properties of gluons, the strong coupling constant is large
at the low energy regime and makes the standard per-
turbation theory inapplicable. Up to now, lattice QCD
(LQCD) is the most important ab initio non-perturbative
method for investigating the low energy properties of
the strong interactions. LQCD is defined on the dis-
cretized Euclidean spacetime lattice and adopts the nu-
merical simulation as its major approach. The major
observables of LQCD are energies and matrix elements
∗ylu@ucas.ac.cn
†wangyijia18@mails.ucas.ac.cn
‡cheny@ihep.ac.cn, corresponding author
§wujiajun@ucas.ac.cn, corresponding author
of hadron systems. However, except for the properties of
ground state hadrons without strong decays, it is usually
non-trivial for lattice results (on the Euclidean spacetime
lattice) to be connected with experimental observables in
the continuum Minkowski spacetime. For example, most
hadrons are resonances observed in the invariant mass
spectrum of multi-hadron system in decay or scattering
processes, while what the lattice QCD can calculate are
the discretized energy levels of related hadron systems on
finite lattices. Therefore, the connection must be estab-
lished.
FIG. 1. The workflow of this work.
One successful approach to address this issue is called
L¨uscher’s formula [14–16], developed by L¨uscher and col-
laborators more than 30 years ago. By making use of
the finite volume effects, L¨uscher’s formula describes re-
lation of the spectrum E(L) of a two-body system on the
finite lattice of size Lwith the scattering phase shift δ(E)
of this system in the continuum Minkowski space. The
extension of L¨uscher’s formula to three-body systems is
still undergoing [17–27]. L¨uscher’s formula and its ex-
tension are not only practically useful, but also is invalu-
ably model-independent on the theoretical side. Deriving
these model-independent theoretical approaches are very
challenging and require a lot of wisdom and insight.
For the multi-channel case, more than one free param-
eters in the scattering amplitude will show up in the infi-
nite volume, while L¨uscher’s formula offers only one con-
arXiv:2210.02184v2 [hep-lat] 8 Apr 2024