Analysis of the Bath Motion in the MM-SQC Dynamics Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Dimensionality Reduction Approaches: Principal Component Analysis

The system-plus-bath model is an important tool to understand nonadiabatic dynamics for large molecular systems. The understanding of the collective motion of a huge number of bath modes is essential to reveal their key roles in the overall dynamics. We apply the principal component analysis (PCA) to investigate the bath motion based on the massive data generated from the MM-SQC (symmetrical quasi-classical dynamics method based on the Meyer-Miller mapping Hamiltonian) nonadiabatic dynamics of the excited-state energy transfer dynamics of Frenkel-exciton model. The PCA method clearly clarifies that two types of bath modes, which either display the strong vibronic couplings or have the frequencies close to electronic transition, are very important to the nonadiabatic dynamics. These observations are fully consistent with the physical insights. This conclusion is obtained purely based on the PCA understanding of the trajectory data, without the large involvement of pre-defined physical knowledge. The results show that the PCA approach, one of the simplest unsupervised machine learning methods, is very powerful to analyze the complicated nonadiabatic dynamics in condensed phase involving many degrees of freedom.