Posterior Inference of Hamiltonian Parameters from RIXS Spectroscopy

arXiv:2608.13848 · cond-mat.str-el, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, physics.data-an, stat.ML · Submitted 2026-08-14 · Read on arXiv

cond-mat.str-el, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, physics.data-an, stat.ML

Submitted: 2026-08-14

Updated: 2026-08-26

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We present the first application of simulation-based inference to resonant inelastic X-ray scattering spectroscopy.

Terminology

Abstract

We present the first application of simulation-based inference to resonant inelastic X-ray scattering spectroscopy. Using truncated marginal neural ratio estimation to efficiently restrict the prior and conditional flow matching as the joint density estimator, we infer full posteriors with a modest simulation budget for two Ni 2+ compounds---NiPS 3 as a representative covalent case and K 2 NiF 4 as a more atomic one. We demonstrate that a vision transformer encoder whose tokenization matches the physical layout of the RIXS map yields better-covered and sharper posteriors than generic image encoders. Applying the validated method to experimental NiPS 3 and K 2 NiF 4 data, we recover a joint posterior that reveals parameter correlations invisible to point estimators, and a posterior predictive distribution that closely matches the observed spectrum. The amortized posterior unlocks a class of analyses not previously available to the field such as nuisance-marginalized uncertainty quantification, multi-measurement posterior fusion and active experimental design.

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