We present three modifications to our recently introduced fast randomized iteration method for full configuration interaction (FCI-FRI) and investigate their effects on the method’s performance for Ne, H 2 O, and N 2 . The initiator approximation, originally developed for full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo, significantly reduces statistical error in FCI-FRI when few samples are used in compression operations, enabling its application to larger chemical systems. The semistochastic extension, which involves exactly preserving a fixed subset of elements in each compression, improves statistical efficiency in some cases but reduces it in others. We also developed a new approach to sampling excitations that yields consistent improvements in statistical efficiency and reductions in computational cost. We discuss possible strategies based on our findings for improving the performance of stochastic quantum chemistry methods more generally.
We present three modifications to our recently introduced fast randomized iteration method for full configuration interaction (FCI-FRI) and investigate their effects on the method’s performance for Ne, H 2 O, and N 2 . The initiator approximation, originally developed for full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo, significantly reduces statistical error in FCI-FRI when few samples are used in compression operations, enabling its application to larger chemical systems. The semistochastic extension, which involves exactly preserving a fixed subset of elements in each compression, improves statistical efficiency in some cases but reduces it in others. We also developed a new approach to sampling excitations that yields consistent improvements in statistical efficiency and reductions in computational cost. We discuss possible strategies based on our findings for improving the performance of stochastic quantum chemistry methods more generally.
We introduce a family of methods for the full configuration interaction problem in quantum chemistry, based on the fast randomized iteration (FRI) framework [Lim, L.-H.; Weare, J. SIAM Rev. 2017, 59, 547; DOI: 10.1137/15M1040827 ]. These methods, which we term “FCI-FRI”, stochastically impose sparsity during iterations of the power method and can be viewed as a generalization of full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) without walkers. In addition to the multinomial scheme commonly used to sample excitations in FCIQMC, we present a systematic scheme where excitations are not sampled independently. Performing ground-state calculations on five small molecules at fixed cost, we find that the systematic FCI-FRI scheme is 11–45 times more statistically efficient than the multinomial FCI-FRI scheme, which is in turn 1.4–178 times more statistically efficient than the original FCIQMC algorithm.
, 547; DOI: 10.1137/15M1040827 ]. These methods, which we term "FCI-FRI", stochastically impose sparsity during iterations of the power method and can be viewed as a generalization of full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) without walkers. In addition to the multinomial scheme commonly used to sample excitations in FCIQMC, we present a systematic scheme where excitations are not sampled independently. Performing ground-state calculations on five small molecules at fixed cost, we find that the systematic FCI-FRI scheme is 11-45 times more statistically efficient than the multinomial FCI-FRI scheme, which is in turn 1.4-178 times more statistically efficient than the original FCIQMC algorithm.
We present a stable and systematically improvable quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) approach to calculating excited-state energies, which we implement using our fast randomized iteration method for the full configuration interaction problem (FCI-FRI). Unlike previous excited-state quantum Monte Carlo methods, our approach, which is based on an asymmetric variant of subspace iteration, avoids the use of dot products of random vectors and instead relies upon trial vectors to maintain orthogonality and estimate eigenvalues. By leveraging recent advances, we apply our method to calculate ground- and excited-state energies of challenging molecular systems in large active spaces, including the carbon dimer with 8 electrons in 108 orbitals (8e,108o), an oxo-Mn(salen) transition metal complex (28e,28o), ozone (18e,87o), and butadiene (22e,82o). In the majority of these test cases, our approach yields total excited-state energies that agree with those from state-of-the-art methods─including heat-bath CI, the density matrix renormalization group approach, and FCIQMC─to within sub-milliHartree accuracy. In all cases, estimated excitation energies agree to within about 0.1 eV.
We expand upon the recent semi-stochastic adaptation to full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC). We present an alternate method for generating the deterministic space without a priori knowledge of the wave function and present stochastic efficiencies for a variety of both molecular and lattice systems. The algorithmic details of an efficient semi-stochastic implementation are presented, with particular consideration given to the effect that the adaptation has on parallel performance in FCIQMC. We further demonstrate the benefit for calculation of reduced density matrices in FCIQMC through replica sampling, where the semi-stochastic adaptation seems to have even larger efficiency gains. We then combine these ideas to produce explicitly correlated corrected FCIQMC energies for the beryllium dimer, for which stochastic errors on the order of wavenumber accuracy are achievable.
A new quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method is used to calculate exact, full configuration-interaction (FCI) energies of the neutral and cationic elements from Li to Mg, in a family of commonly used basis sets. Annihilation processes between positive and negative walkers enable the exact N-electron wave function to emerge as a linear superposition of the (factorially large) space of Slater determinants, with individual determinants being stochastically sampled. As a result, extremely large spaces (exceeding 10(15) determinants) become accessible for FCI calculations. No fixed-node approximation is necessary, and the only remaining source of error is the one-electron basis set, which can be systematically reduced by enlargement of the basis set. We have investigated the family of aug-cc-pVXZ Dunning basis sets up to X=5. The resulting ionization potentials are--with one exception (Na)--consistently accurate to within chemical accuracy. The anomalous case of Na suggests that its basis set may be improvable. Extrapolation schemes are examined as a way of further improving the values obtained, and although an improvement is seen in the mean-absolute error, the results of extrapolation are not uniformly better than the largest basis set calculations reported. More generally, these results demonstrate the utility of the QMC method to provide FCI energies for realistic systems and basis sets.
Development of exponentially scaling methods has seen great progress in tackling larger systems than previously thought possible. One such technique, full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo, is a useful algorithm that allows exact diagonalization through stochastically sampling determinants. The method derives its utility from the information in the matrix elements of the Hamiltonian, along with a stochastic projected wave function, to find the important parts of Hilbert space. However, the stochastic representation of the wave function is not required to search Hilbert space efficiently, and here we describe a highly efficient deterministic method that can achieve chemical accuracy for a wide range of systems, including the difficult Cr2 molecule. We demonstrate for systems like Cr2 that such calculations can be performed in just a few cpu hours which makes it one of the most efficient and accurate methods that can attain chemical accuracy for strongly correlated systems. In addition our method also allows efficient calculation of excited state energies, which we illustrate with benchmark results for the excited states of C2.