arxivphysics.chem-phcond-mat.stat-mechcs.LGphysics.comp-phquant-ph2026-07-22
Nuclear Quantum Effects as a Denoising Problem
Weizhou Wang, Jonathan Weare, Aaron R. Dinner
Nuclear quantum effects are rigorously captured by imaginary-time path integrals, which map the quantum Boltzmann distribution onto a ring polymer of classical replicas. Yet the nuclear masses, the coupling to the environment, and the boundary conditions of the path remain hard-w…