Bond stretching mimics different levels of electron correlation and provides a challenging test bed for approximate many-body computational methods. Using the recently developed phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AF QMC) method, we examine bond stretching in the well-studied molecules BH and N(2) and in the H(50) chain. To control the sign/phase problem, the phaseless AF QMC method constrains the paths in the auxiliary-field path integrals with an approximate phase condition that depends on a trial wave function. With single Slater determinants from unrestricted Hartree-Fock as trial wave function, the phaseless AF QMC method generally gives better overall accuracy and a more uniform behavior than the coupled cluster CCSD(T) method in mapping the potential-energy curve. In both BH and N(2), we also study the use of multiple-determinant trial wave functions from multiconfiguration self-consistent-field calculations. The increase in computational cost versus the gain in statistical and systematic accuracy are examined. With such trial wave functions, excellent results are obtained across the entire region between equilibrium and the dissociation limit.
Bond stretching mimics different levels of electron correlation and provides a challenging test bed for approximate many-body computational methods. Using the recently developed phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AF QMC) method, we examine bond stretching in the well-studied molecules BH and N(2) and in the H(50) chain. To control the sign/phase problem, the phaseless AF QMC method constrains the paths in the auxiliary-field path integrals with an approximate phase condition that depends on a trial wave function. With single Slater determinants from unrestricted Hartree-Fock as trial wave function, the phaseless AF QMC method generally gives better overall accuracy and a more uniform behavior than the coupled cluster CCSD(T) method in mapping the potential-energy curve. In both BH and N(2), we also study the use of multiple-determinant trial wave functions from multiconfiguration self-consistent-field calculations. The increase in computational cost versus the gain in statistical and systematic accuracy are examined. With such trial wave functions, excellent results are obtained across the entire region between equilibrium and the dissociation limit.
to develop quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) approaches for excited states and for more systematic and accurate treatment of ground states of strongly correlated sytems and heavier elements. We use the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) framework, which is a many-body total energy method that looks like many coupled mean-field calculations. I will discuss this method’s relations and dierences with traditional density-functional and quantum chemistry methods, and with other forms of QMC. The AFQMC method uses importance-sampled random walks in the space of nonorthogonal Slater determinants to project out the many-body ground state, or excited state. The random walks are constrained by a trial wave function (TWF) to remove the so-called sign problem, giving approximate (but non-perturbative) results. With singledeterminant TWFs from Hartree-Fock or density-functional theory (DFT), this approach can be thought of as a post-DFT method with no parameter. In this form, the accuracy is typically comparable to the quantum chemistry coupled-cluster CCSD(T) method near equilibrium geometries, and better than CCSD(T) when bonds are stretched. The computational cost of AFQMC scales as N 3 with characteristic size of the system. Its accuracy can be further improved at the cost of increased computing (releasing the constraint) or better TWF. With AFQMC, we can systematically target selected orbitals to correlate. This allows many-body calculations in solids with a frozen core, with down-folded Hamiltonians, or possibly embeded in a DFT calculations to extend scales. Results from a few on-going applications will be presented, including band structures in simple solids, magnetic phases in MnO, and Cobalt adsoption on graphene.
The phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AF QMC) method [S. Zhang and H. Krakauer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 136401 (2003)] is used to carry out a systematic study of the dissociation and ionization energies of second-row group 3A--7A atoms and dimers: Al, Si, P, S, and Cl. In addition, the P2 dimer is compared to the third-row As2 dimer, which is also triply bonded. This method projects the many-body ground state by means of importance-sampled random walks in the space of Slater determinants. The Monte Carlo phase problem, due to the electron-electron Coulomb interaction, is controlled via the phaseless approximation, with a trial wave function $\ensuremath{\mid}{\ensuremath{\Psi}}_{T}⟩$. As in previous calculations, a mean-field single Slater determinant is used as $\ensuremath{\mid}{\ensuremath{\Psi}}_{T}⟩$. The method is formulated in the Hilbert space defined by any chosen one-particle basis. The present calculations use a plane wave basis under periodic boundary conditions with norm-conserving pseudopotentials. Computational details of the plane wave AF QMC method are presented. The isolated systems chosen here allow a systematic study of the various algorithmic issues. We show the accuracy of the plane wave method and discuss its convergence with respect to parameters such as the supercell size and plane wave cutoff. The use of standard norm-conserving pseudopotentials in the many-body AF QMC framework is examined.
Generalized Hartree Fock (GHF) is a long-established electronic structure method that can lower the energy (compared to spin-restricted variants) by breaking physical wavefunction symmetries, namely S^2 and Sz. After an exposition of GHF theory, we assess the use of GHF trial wavefunctions in phaseless auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC-G) calculations of strongly correlated molecular systems including symmetrically stretched hydrogen rings, carbon dioxide, and dioxygen. We find comparable or better accuracy than CCSD(T) with unrestricted HF and GHF references, and consistently smooth dissociation curves -- a remarkable result given the relative scalability of ph-AFQMC-G to larger system sizes. The present exploration of model strongly correlated systems marks a promising starting point for future studies of more chemically-relevant molecules, and demonstrates that ph-AFQMC-G provides a highly accurate (and, in contrast to active-space-based trials, relatively black box and always size-consistent) description of challenging systems exhibiting, e.g., antiferromagnetic coupling and/or geometric spin frustration.
We show that the recently developed phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) method can be used to study excited states, providing an alternative to standard quantum chemistry methods. The phaseless AFQMC approach, whose computational cost scales as M(3)-M(4) with system size M, has been shown to be among the most accurate many-body methods in ground state calculations. For excited states, prevention of collapse into the ground state and control of the Fermion sign/phase problem are accomplished by the approximate phaseless constraint with a trial wave function. Using the challenging C(2) molecule as a test case, we calculate the potential energy curves of the ground and two low-lying singlet excited states. The trial wave function is obtained by truncating complete active space wave functions, with no further optimization. The phaseless AFQMC results using a small basis set are in good agreement with exact full configuration-interaction calculations, while those using large basis sets are in good agreement with experimental spectroscopic constants.
In this work, we present an overview of the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) approach from a computational quantum chemistry perspective and present a numerical assessment of its performance on main group chemistry and bond-breaking problems with a total of 1004 relative energies. While our benchmark study is somewhat limited, we make recommendations for the use of ph-AFQMC for general main-group chemistry applications. For systems where single determinant wave functions are qualitatively accurate, we expect the accuracy of ph-AFQMC in conjunction with a single-determinant trial wave function to be between that of coupled-cluster with singles and doubles (CCSD) and CCSD with perturbative triples (CCSD(T)). For these applications, ph-AFQMC should be a method of choice when canonical CCSD(T) is too expensive to run. For systems where multireference (MR) wave functions are needed for qualitative accuracy, ph-AFQMC is far more accurate than MR perturbation theory methods and competitive with MR configuration interaction (MRCI) methods. Due to the computational efficiency of ph-AFQMC compared to MRCI, we recommended ph-AFQMC as a method of choice for handling dynamic correlation in MR problems. We conclude with a discussion of important directions for future development of the ph-AFQMC approach.
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide We report a scalable Fortran implementation of the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) and demonstrate its excellent performance and beneficial scaling with respect to system size. Furthermore, we investigate modifications of the phaseless approximation that can help to reduce the overcorrelation problems common to the ph-AFQMC. We apply the method to the 26 molecules in the HEAT set, the benzene molecule, and water clusters. We observe a mean absolute deviation of the total energy of 1.15 kcal/mol for the molecules in the HEAT set, close to chemical accuracy. For the benzene molecule, the modified algorithm despite using a single-Slater-determinant trial wavefunction yields the same accuracy as the original phaseless scheme with 400 Slater determinants. Despite these improvements, we find systematic errors for the CN, CO 2, and O 2 molecules that need to be addressed with more accurate trial wavefunctions. For water clusters, we find that the ph-AFQMC yields excellent binding energies that differ from CCSD(T) by typically less than 0.5 kcal/mol.