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arXiv:1908.10588 · The Journal of Chemical Physics

Time-dependent density matrix renormalization group quantum dynamics for realistic chemical systems

Xiaoyu Xie, Yuyang Liu, Yao Yao, Ulrich Schollwöck, Chungen Liu, Haibo Ma

Published Dec 9, 2019• 75 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Electronic and/or vibronic coherence has been found by recent ultrafast spectroscopy experiments in many chemical, biological, and material systems. This indicates that there are strong and complicated interactions between electronic states and vibration modes in realistic chemical systems. Therefore, simulations of quantum dynamics with a large number of electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom are highly desirable. Due to the efficient compression and localized representation of quantum states in the matrix-product state (MPS) formulation, time-evolution methods based on the MPS framework, which we summarily refer to as tDMRG (time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group) methods, are considered to be promising candidates to study the quantum dynamics of realistic chemical systems. In this work, we benchmark the performances of four different tDMRG methods, including global Taylor, global Krylov, and local one-site and two-site time-dependent variational principles (1TDVP and 2TDVP), with a comparison to multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree and experimental results. Two typical chemical systems of internal conversion and singlet fission are investigated: one containing strong and high-order local and nonlocal electron-vibration couplings and the other exhibiting a continuous phonon bath. The comparison shows that the tDMRG methods (particularly, the 2TDVP method) can describe the full quantum dynamics in large chemical systems accurately and efficiently. Several key parameters in the tDMRG calculation including the truncation error threshold, time interval, and ordering of local sites were also investigated to strike the balance between efficiency and accuracy of results.

DOI
10.1063/1.5125945

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Electronic and/or vibronic coherence has been found by recent ultrafast spectroscopy experiments in many chemical, biological, and material systems. This indicates that there are strong and complicated interactions between electronic states and vibration modes in realistic chemical systems. Therefore, simulations of quantum dynamics with a large number of electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom are highly desirable. Due to the efficient compression and localized representation of quantum states in the matrix-product state (MPS) formulation, time-evolution methods based on the MPS framework, which we summarily refer to as tDMRG (time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group) methods, are considered to be promising candidates to study the quantum dynamics of realistic chemical systems. In this work, we benchmark the performances of four different tDMRG methods, including global Taylor, global Krylov, and local one-site and two-site time-dependent variational principles (1TDVP and 2TDVP), with a comparison to multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree and experimental results. Two typical chemical systems of internal conversion and singlet fission are investigated: one containing strong and high-order local and nonlocal electron-vibration couplings and the other exhibiting a continuous phonon bath. The comparison shows that the tDMRG methods (particularly, the 2TDVP method) can describe the full quantum dynamics in large chemical systems accurately and efficiently. Several key parameters in the tDMRG calculation including the truncation error threshold, time interval, and ordering of local sites were also investigated to strike the balance between efficiency and accuracy of results.
Recent advances in experimental techniques have enabled precise characterization of fundamental nonadiabatic and even electronic dynamics in molecules, on ultrafast time scales reaching femtosecond to attosecond resolution. However, accurate theoretical simulation of these ultrafast chemical dynamics processes in large systems remains challenging, largely due to the overwhelming number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) and the pronounced many-body correlations. In recent years, by leveraging efficient decomposition schemes for high-dimensional wave function and operator tensors, the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (TD-DMRG) has emerged as a powerful and accurate quantum dynamics method for simulating nonadiabatic and electron dynamics in large chemical systems, in conjunction with realistic electron/exciton-vibration/phonon models or ab initio quantum chemistry many-electron Hamiltonians. This review outlines the fundamentals of TD-DMRG for chemical dynamics, covering matrix product state/operator (MPS/MPO) frameworks and algorithms from ground-state calculations to time evolution. We discuss thermal/environmental effects and compare TD-DMRG with other tensor network methods such as multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree (MCTDH) and multilayer MCTDH (ML-MCTDH). Demonstrated applications include simulations of pyrazine absorption, singlet fission in rubrene crystal, and charge migration in chloroacetylene cation. These show TD-DMRG’s capability for modeling complex ultrafast processes from femtoseconds to attoseconds with controlled accuracy.
Matrix product state (MPS) is one efficient way to compress quantum states and reduce computational cost. This chapter presents the application of MPS framework as well as time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) variants in chemical systems. The elementary principles of MPS approaches are provided, including the basic concept of MPS and matrix product operator, the density matrix renormalization group method and tDMRG approaches based on the MPS/matrix product operator framework to solve the time-independent and dependent Schrödinger equation, respectively. Then, several examples of tDMRG applications in chemical systems investigated by the authors, including charge carrier dynamics in polymer chain, charge transfer and dissociation in organic systems, nonadiabatic dynamics of excited states S1/S2 in pyrazine molecule and singlet fission processes in organic systems, are displayed.
The accurate theoretical interpretation of ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy experiments relies on full quantum dynamics simulations for the investigated system, which is nevertheless computationally prohibitive for realistic molecular systems with a large number of electronic and/or vibrational degrees of freedom. In this work, we propose a unitary transformation approach for realistic vibronic Hamiltonians, which can be coped with using the adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (t-DMRG) method to efficiently evolve the nonadiabatic dynamics of a large molecular system. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of this approach with an example of simulating the exciton dissociation process within an oligothiophene/fullerene heterojunction, indicating that t-DMRG can be a promising method for full quantum dynamics simulation in large chemical systems. Moreover, it is also shown that the proper vibronic features in the ultrafast electronic process can be obtained by simulating the two-dimensional (2D) electronic spectrum by virtue of the high computational efficiency of the t-DMRG method.
Thanks to the high compression of the matrix product state (MPS) form of the wave function and the efficient site-by-site iterative sweeping optimization algorithm, the density matrix normalization group (DMRG) and its time-dependent variant (TD-DMRG) have been established as powerful computational tools in accurately simulating the electronic structure and quantum dynamics of strongly correlated molecules with a large number (10 1–2 ) of quantum degrees of freedom (active orbitals or vibrational modes). However, the quantitative characterization of the quantum many-body behaviors of realistic strongly correlated systems requires a further consideration of the interaction between the embedded active subsystem and the remaining correlated environment, e.g., a larger number (10 2–3 ) of external orbitals in electronic structure or infinite condensed-phase phononic modes in nucleus dynamics. To this end, we introduced three new post-DMRG and TD-DMRG approaches, namely (1) DMRG2sCI-MRCI and DMRG2sCI-ENPT by the reconstruction of selected configuration interaction (sCI) type of compact reference function from DMRG coefficients and the use of externally contracted MRCI (multireference configuration interaction) and Epstein–Nesbet perturbation theory (ENPT), without recourse to the expensive high order n -electron reduced density matrices ( n -RDMs). (2) DMRG combined with RR-MRCI (renormalized residue-based MRCI), which improves the computational accuracy and efficiency of internally contracted (ic) MRCI by renormalizing the contracted bases with small-sized buffer environment(s) of a few external orbitals as probes based on quantum information theory. (3) HM (hierarchical mapping)-TD-DMRG in which a large environment is reduced to a small number of renormalized environmental modes (which accounts for the most vital system–environment interactions) through stepwise mapping transformation. These advances extend the efficacy of highly accurate DMRG/TD-DMRG computations to the quantitative characterization of the electronic structure and quantum dynamics in realistic strongly correlated systems coupled with large environments and are reviewed in this paper.
Substantial progress of the time-dependent density matrix renormalisation group (t-DMRG) method in the recent 15 years is reviewed in this paper. By integrating the time evolution with the sweep procedures in density matrix renormalisation group (DMRG), t-DMRG provides an efficient tool for real-time simulations of the quantum dynamics for one-dimensional (1D) or quasi-1D strongly correlated systems with a large number of degrees of freedom. In the illustrative applications, the t-DMRG approach is applied to investigate the nonadiabatic processes in realistic chemical systems, including exciton dissociation and triplet fission in polymers and molecular aggregates as well as internal conversion in pyrazine molecule.
In recent years, the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) method based on the matrix product state (MPS) wave function formulation has shown its great power in performing large-scale quantum dynamics simulations for realistic chemical systems with strong electron-vibration interactions. In this work, we propose a stochastic adaptive single-site TDVP (SA-1TDVP) scheme to evolve the bond-dimension adaptively, which can integrate the traditional advantages of both the high efficiency of the single-site TDVP (1TDVP) variant and the high accuracy of the two-site TDVP (2TDVP) variant. Based on the assumption that the level statistics of entanglement Hamiltonians, which originate from the reduced density matrices of the MPS method, follows a Poisson or Wigner distribution, as generically predicted by random-matrix theory, additional random singular values are generated to expand the bond-dimension automatically. Tests on simulating the vibrationally resolved quantum dynamics and absorption spectra in the pyrazine molecule and perylene bisimide (PBI) J-aggregate trimer as well as a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain show that it can be automatic and as accurate as 2TDVP but reduce the computational time remarkably.