Approaching the Inverse Neutron Scattering Problem with Neural Networks

Determining the microscopic Hamiltonian of a quantum magnet from inelastic neutron scattering measurements remains a central challenge in condensed matter physics. While the dynamical spin structure factor contains, in principle, sufficient information about the underlying interactions, extracting Hamiltonian parameters from experimental spectra constitutes a highly nontrivial inverse problem due to the large parameter space and the presence of experimental noise. Here we demonstrate that neural networks can efficiently solve this inverse problem for a broad class of quantum magnets. As a benchmark, we consider an eight-parameter family of honeycomb lattice Heisenberg spin models in the fully polarized phase, where the dynamical spin structure factor can be computed exactly within linear spin-wave theory. Using a large synthetic dataset of neutron scattering spectra, we train neural networks to infer the underlying Hamiltonian parameters directly from the dynamical response. We compare the performance of three different architectures---fully connected neural networks (FCNNs), one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNN1Ds), and two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNN2Ds)---and find that all achieve high predictive accuracy. Remarkably, the trained models remain robust in the presence of substantial experimental uncertainty, reliably recovering the Hamiltonian parameters even when the input spectra are contaminated by random noise with amplitudes reaching 10% of the signal intensity. Our results establish machine learning as a powerful framework for quantitative Hamiltonian reconstruction from neutron scattering data and provide a practical route toward automated characterization of quantum magnetic materials.