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arXiv:1403.0606

Comment on "Breaking the theoretical scaling limit for predicting quasi-particle energies: The stochastic GW approach", by Daniel Neuhauser et al., arXiv:1402.5035v1

Behnam Farid

Published Mar 3, 2014• 0 citations
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Abstract

We show that the recently-introduced formalism by Neuhauser et al. for the calculation of the quasi-particle energies of electronic systems within the framework of the GW approximation of the self-energy operator, named the `stochastic GW approach' and empirically shown to have a linear-scaling arithmetic complexity for increasing number of electrons, suffers from two fundamental shortcomings that cannot be overcome while maintaining the present empirical linear-scaling property of the approach.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1403.0606

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The Journal of Chemical Physics•Oct 28, 2014•28 citations
We show that the recently-introduced formalism by Neuhauser et al. for the calculation of the quasi-particle energies of electronic systems within the framework of the GW approximation of the self-energy operator, named the `stochastic GW approach' and empirically shown to have a linear-scaling arithmetic complexity for increasing number of electrons, suffers from two fundamental shortcomings that cannot be overcome while maintaining the present empirical linear-scaling property of the approach.
We develop a formalism to calculate the quasiparticle energy within the GW many-body perturbation correction to the density functional theory. The occupied and virtual orbitals of the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian are replaced by stochastic orbitals used to evaluate the Green function G, the polarization potential W, and, thereby, the GW self-energy. The stochastic GW (sGW) formalism relies on novel theoretical concepts such as stochastic time-dependent Hartree propagation, stochastic matrix compression, and spatial or temporal stochastic decoupling techniques. Beyond the theoretical interest, the formalism enables linear scaling GW calculations breaking the theoretical scaling limit for GW as well as circumventing the need for energy cutoff approximations. We illustrate the method for silicon nanocrystals of varying sizes with N_{e}>3000 electrons.
The GWGWGW approximation for the electronic self-energy is an important tool for the quantitative prediction of excited states in solids, but its mathematical exploration is hampered by the fact that it must, in general, be evaluated numerically even for very simple systems. In this paper I describe a nontrivial model consisting of two electrons on the surface of a sphere, interacting with the normal long-range Coulomb potential, and show that the GWGWGW self-energy, in the absence of self-consistency, can in fact be derived completely analytically in this case. The resulting expression is subsequently used to analyze the convergence of the energy gap between the highest occupied and the lowest unoccupied quasiparticle orbital with respect to the total number of states included in the spectral summations. The asymptotic formula for the truncation error obtained in this way, whose dominant contribution is proportional to the cutoff energy to the power $\ensuremath{-}3/2$, may be adapted to extrapolate energy gaps in other systems.
We develop a stochastic resolution of identity approach to the real-time second-order Green’s function (real-time sRI-GF2) theory, extending our recent work for imaginary-time Matsubara Green’s function [Takeshita et al. J. Chem. Phys. 2019, 151, 044114 ]. The approach provides a framework to obtain the quasi-particle spectra across a wide range of frequencies and predicts ionization potentials and electron affinities. To assess the accuracy of the real-time sRI-GF2, we study a series of molecules and compare our results to experiments as well as to a many-body perturbation approach based on the GW approximation, where we find that the real-time sRI-GF2 is as accurate as self-consistent GW. The stochastic formulation reduces the formal computatinal scaling from O ( N e 5 ) down to O ( N e 3 ) where N e is the number of electrons. This is illustrated for a chain of hydrogen dimers, where we observe a slightly lower than cubic scaling for systems containing up to N e ≈ 1000 electrons.
This comment regards a central aspect of the referred-to paper, the issue of convergence of the large coordination-number expansion. Perturbation expansions of expressions containing a large number of parameters are generally invalid due to the non-analyticity of the expanded expressions. I refer to recent work where these issues are analyzed and discussed in detail in relation to a benchmark example of a cluster model. As discussed therein, methods which are uncontrollable and for which their convergence is not foreseeable are not only useless but can mislead, particularly if models derived from them are used to interpret experiments.
We introduce a scheme through which the ground-state electronic density n and total energy Ev [n] of inhomogeneous interacting systems can be determined in a self-consistent (SC) way. It is based on a SC perturbation expansion for the single-particle Green function G. Our employed expansion is argued to be valid under all conditions provided that the ground-state charge density of the interacting system is pure-state non-interacting v representable. The formalism discussed in this paper has been applied to a quasi-one-dimensional periodic system. It has even been possible to carry out SC calculations with the dynamically screened exchange diagram (the so-called GW diagram, where W is the dynamically screened electron-electron interaction function) for the self-energy operator Σ. A coherent mode of interpretation of a number of our results entails that the overwhelming success of the GW framework in relatively accurately reproducing the experimental energy gaps of a number of semiconductors and insulators may be a direct consequence of non-self-consistency effects; whereas a non-self-consistent calculation in our tests increases the value of the local-density approximation (LDA) gap in the range of 40–65% of the ‘experimental’ gaps, self-consistency effects reduce this range to 14–17%. The same line of argument leads us to conclude that, in our model, 26–35% of the LDA error in the gap energies is due to the absence of a well known discontinuity in the LDA exchange-correlation potential, and the remaining part is due to the Kohn-Sham eigenvalues not being identifiable with one-particle excitation energies. A natural conclusion that may be drawn from these observations is that a correct description of excitation energies (e.g. of the gap energy) cannot be achieved without including, at least approximately, the vertex part of Σ, which is entirely absent in the GW scheme.
The example of the uniform electron gas is used for showing that the short-range electron correlation is difficult to handle numerically, while it noticeably contributes to the self-energy. Nonetheless, in condensed-matter applications studied with advanced methods, such as the GW and random-phase approximations, it is common to neglect contributions due to high-momentum (large q) transfers. Then, the short-range correlation is poorly described, which leads to inaccurate correlation energies and quasiparticle spectra. To circumvent this problem, an accurate extrapolation scheme is proposed. It is based on an analytical derivation for the uniform electron gas presented in this paper, and it provides an explanation why accurate GW quasiparticle spectra are easy to obtain for some compounds and very difficult for others.