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A Pedagogical Framework for Physics-Informed Machine Learning: From Classical Pendulum to Quantum Anharmonic Oscillator Using PyTorch on Modern GPU Hardware

Quantum Physics 2026-04-07 v2

Abstract

We present a five-module pedagogical framework for teaching physics-informed machine learning (ML) through two progressively complex physical systems: a driven, damped nonlinear pendulum and a one-dimensional quantum anharmonic oscillator. Five model architectures are implemented and compared: a standard artificial neural network (ANN), a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN), a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, and two physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) -- one per physical system. All models are implemented in PyTorch~2.9 and executed on an NVIDIA RTX~5090 GPU, making the framework directly applicable to modern deep learning laboratory courses. Quantitative benchmarks show that data-driven models achieve mean absolute errors of 1.3×1021.3\times10^{-2}~rad (pendulum ANN) and 4.4×1054.4\times10^{-5}~a.u.\ (quantum CNN), while the curriculum-trained pendulum PINN reaches an MAE of 3.1×1023.1\times10^{-2}~rad using only collocation points. A systematic CPU-vs-GPU benchmark reveals speedups ranging from 1.2×1.2\times (small ANN) to 24.6×24.6\times (LSTM), providing a concrete pedagogical demonstration of when GPU acceleration is -- and is not -- warranted. The framework is packaged as self-contained Jupyter notebooks designed for a graduate-level \emph{Deep Neural Networks for Physical Systems} course, with embedded reflection questions that guide students from data-driven thinking toward physics-constrained formulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.05621,
  title  = {A Pedagogical Framework for Physics-Informed Machine Learning: From Classical Pendulum to Quantum Anharmonic Oscillator Using PyTorch on Modern GPU Hardware},
  author = {Enis Yazici},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05621},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:37:20.600Z