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arXiv:0805.4457 · Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Variational Monte Carlo Method Combined with Quantum-Number Projection and Multi-Variable Optimization

Daisuke Tahara, Masatoshi Imada

Published Oct 27, 2008• 147 citations
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Abstract

Variational wave functions used in the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method are extensively improved to overcome the biases coming from the assumed variational form of the wave functions. We construct a highly generalized variational form by introducing a large number of variational parameters to the Gutzwiller-Jastrow factor as well as to the one-body part. Moreover, the projection operator to restore the symmetry of the wave function is introduced. These improvements enable to treat fluctuations with long-ranged as well as short-ranged correlations. A highly generalized wave function is implemented by the Pfaffians introduced by Bouchaud et al., together with the stochastic reconfiguration method introduced by Sorella for the parameter optimization. Our framework offers much higher accuracy for strongly correlated electron systems than the conventional variational Monte Carlo methods.

DOI
10.1143/jpsj.77.114701

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Variational wave functions used in the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method are extensively improved to overcome the biases coming from the assumed variational form of the wave functions. We construct a highly generalized variational form by introducing a large number of variational parameters to the Gutzwiller-Jastrow factor as well as to the one-body part. Moreover, the projection operator to restore the symmetry of the wave function is introduced. These improvements enable to treat fluctuations with long-ranged as well as short-ranged correlations. A highly generalized wave function is implemented by the Pfaffians introduced by Bouchaud et al., together with the stochastic reconfiguration method introduced by Sorella for the parameter optimization. Our framework offers much higher accuracy for strongly correlated electron systems than the conventional variational Monte Carlo methods.
We revisit the accuracy of the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method by taking an example of ground state properties for the one-dimensional Hubbard model. We start from the variational wave functions with the Gutzwiller and long-range Jastrow factor introduced by Capello et al. [Phys. Rev. B 72 , 085121 (2005)] and further improve it by considering several quantum-number projections and a generalized one-body wave function. We find that the quantum spin projection and total momentum projection greatly improve the accuracy of the ground state energy within 0.5% error, for both small and large systems at half filling. Besides, the momentum distribution function n ( k ) at quarter filling calculated up to 196 sites allows us direct estimate of the critical exponents of the charge correlations from the power-law behavior of n ( k ) near the Fermi wave vector. Estimated critical exponents well reproduce those predicted by the Tomonaga-Luttinger theory.
We show that the standard Lanczos algorithm can be efficiently implemented statistically and self-consistently improved, using the stochastic reconfiguration method, which has been recently introduced to stabilize the Monte Carlo sign problem instability. With this scheme a few Lanczos steps over a given variational wave function are possible even for large size as a particular case of a more general and more accurate technique that allows to obtain lower variational energies. This method has been tested extensively for a strongly correlated model like the $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model. With the standard Lanczos technique it is possible to compute any kind of correlation functions, with no particular computational effort. By using the fact that the variance $〈{H}^{2}〉\ensuremath{-}〈H{〉}^{2}$ is zero for an exact eigenstate, we show that the approach to the exact solution with few Lanczos iterations is indeed possible even for $\ensuremath{\sim}100$ electrons for reasonably good initial wave functions. The variational stochastic reconfiguration technique presented here allows in general a many-parameter energy optimization of any computable many-body wave function, including for instance generic long-range Jastrow factors and arbitrary site-dependent orbital determinants. This scheme improves further the accuracy of the calculation, especially for long-distance correlation functions.
We extend our low-scaling variational Monte Carlo (VMC) algorithm to optimize the symmetry-projected Jastrow mean-field (SJMF) wave functions. These wave functions consist of a symmetry-projected product of a Jastrow and a general broken-symmetry mean-field reference. Examples include Jastrow antisymmetrized geminal power, Jastrow-Pfaffians, and resonating valence bond states, among others, all of which can be treated with our algorithm. We will demonstrate using benchmark systems including the nitrogen molecule, a chain of hydrogen atoms, and 2-D Hubbard model that a significant amount of correlation can be obtained by optimizing the energy of the SJMF wave function. This can be achieved at a relatively small cost when multiple symmetries including spin, particle number, and complex conjugation are simultaneously broken and projected. We also show that reduced density matrices can be calculated using the optimized wave functions, which allows us to calculate other observables such as correlation functions and will enable us to embed the VMC algorithm in a complete active-space self-consistent field calculation.
We develop a variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method for electron-phonon coupled systems. The VMC method has been extensively used for investigating strongly correlated electrons over the last decades. However, its applications to electron-phonon coupled systems have been severely restricted because of its large Hilbert space. Here, we propose a variational wave function with a large number of variational parameters, which is suitable and tractable for systems with electron-phonon coupling. In the proposed wave function, we implement an unexplored electron-phonon correlation factor, which takes into account the effect of the entanglement between electrons and phonons. The method is applied to systems with diagonal electron-phonon interactions, i.e., interactions between charge densities and lattice displacements (phonons). As benchmarks, we compare VMC results with previous results obtained by the exact diagonalization, the Green function Monte Carlo method and the density matrix renormalization group for the Holstein and Holstein-Hubbard model. From these benchmarks, we show that the present method offers an efficient way to treat strongly coupled electron-phonon systems.
A scheme of optimization of a trial wave function in the variational Monte Carlo calculation is developed. It provides a more precise description of the ground state for strongly correlated electronic systems with highly improved trial wave function. A general type of variational wave function constructed from a linear combination of Slater determinants multiplied by Jastrow correlation factors is proposed. They can explicitly contain low-energy fluctuations and long-range correlations. Using this optimization method, we examine the properties of these wave functions by applying them to a one-dimensional Hubbard model for which the exact solution is available for comparison. It is found that these wave functions prove to be substantial improvements compared to the conventional Jastrow-type wave functions.
Variational quantum Monte Carlo (VMC) method applied to interacting electron systems has played a pivotal role for the studies of electronic states of atoms, molecules and condensed matters. First, the many-body wave functions optimized by the VMC method provide good guiding functions in more accurate, diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations for identical systems. Second, the VMC calculations themselves can give a good upper bound for the exact ground-state energy of many-electron systems when an appropriate form for the variational wave function is employed. In addition to a conventional form for the variational wave function that is expressed by the product of the Jastrow factor and the single Slater determinant, recent investigations have found that the expression in terms of many Slater determinants can provide a very accurate description of electronic states, especially for intrinsically multi-reference systems, which corresponds to the configuration interaction (CI) expansion method in conventional quantum chemistry. Although the CI method needs an extremely large number of expansion coefficients as variational parameters, the number of parameters can be reduced efficiently by using an idea of (molecular) orbital pair correlations. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the feasibility and usefulness of this idea within the framework of VMC method with the Jastrow–Slater wave function, where the ground state of a water molecule is investigated as a test case. In this study we rely on a variational wave function composed of a product of the Jastrow and Slater parts as 1⁄4 J S; ð1Þ