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arXiv:2302.13296 · Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation

A Regularized Second-Order Correlation Method from Green’s Function Theory

Christopher J. N. Coveney, David P. Tew

Published Jun 27, 2023• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a scalable single-particle framework to treat electronic correlation in molecules and materials motivated by Green's function theory. We derive a size-extensive Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory from the single-particle Green's function by introducing the Goldstone self-energy. This new ground state correlation energy, referred to as Quasi-Particle MP2 theory (QPMP2), avoids the characteristic divergences present in both second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory and Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles within the strongly correlated regime. We show that the exact ground state energy and properties of the Hubbard dimer are reproduced by QPMP2 and demonstrate the advantages of the approach for larger Hubbard models where the metal-to-insulator transition is qualitatively reproduced, contrasting with the complete failure of traditional methods. We apply this formalism to characteristic strongly correlated molecular systems and show that QPMP2 provides an efficient, size-consistent regularization of MP2.

DOI
10.1021/acs.jctc.3c00246

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We present a scalable single-particle framework to treat electronic correlation in molecules and materials motivated by Green's function theory. We derive a size-extensive Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory from the single-particle Green's function by introducing the Goldstone self-energy. This new ground state correlation energy, referred to as Quasi-Particle MP2 theory (QPMP2), avoids the characteristic divergences present in both second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory and Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles within the strongly correlated regime. We show that the exact ground state energy and properties of the Hubbard dimer are reproduced by QPMP2 and demonstrate the advantages of the approach for larger Hubbard models where the metal-to-insulator transition is qualitatively reproduced, contrasting with the complete failure of traditional methods. We apply this formalism to characteristic strongly correlated molecular systems and show that QPMP2 provides an efficient, size-consistent regularization of MP2.
Second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) constitutes the simplest form of many-body wavefunction theory and often provides a good compromise between efficiency and accuracy. There are, however, well-known limitations to this approach. In particular, MP2 is known to fail or diverge for some prototypical condensed matter systems like the homogeneous electron gas (HEG) and to overestimate dispersion-driven interactions in strongly polarizable systems. In this paper, we explore how the issues of MP2 for metallic, polarizable, and strongly correlated periodic systems can be ameliorated through regularization. To this end, two regularized second-order methods (including a new, size-extensive Brillouin-Wigner approach) are applied to the HEG, the one-dimensional Hubbard model, and the graphene-water interaction. We find that regularization consistently leads to improvements over the MP2 baseline and that different regularizers are appropriate for the various systems.
Second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory is well-known as a computationally inexpensive approach to the electron correlation problem that is size-consistent with a size-consistent reference but fails to be regular. On the other hand, the less well-known many-body version of Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory has the reverse properties: it is regular but fails to be size-consistent when used with the standard MP partitioning. Consequently, its widespread use remains limited. In this work, we analyze the ways in which it is possible to use alternative non-MP partitions of the Hamiltonian to yield variants of BW2 that are size-consistent as well as regular. We show that there is a vast space of such BW2 theories and also show that it is possible to define a repartitioned BW2 theory from the ground state density alone, which regenerates the exact correlation energy. We also provide a general recipe for deriving regular, size-consistent, and size-extensive partitions from physically meaningful components, and we apply the result to small model systems. The scope of these results appears to further set the stage for a revival of BW2 in quantum chemistry.
We report an implementation of self-consistent Green's function many-body theory within a second-order approximation (GF2) for application with molecular systems. This is done by iterative solution of the Dyson equation expressed in matrix form in an atomic orbital basis, where the Green's function and self-energy are built on the imaginary frequency and imaginary time domain, respectively, and fast Fourier transform is used to efficiently transform these quantities as needed. We apply this method to several archetypical examples of strong correlation, such as a H32 finite lattice that displays a highly multireference electronic ground state even at equilibrium lattice spacing. In all cases, GF2 gives a physically meaningful description of the metal to insulator transition in these systems, without resorting to spin-symmetry breaking. Our results show that self-consistent Green's function many-body theory offers a viable route to describing strong correlations while remaining within a computationally tractable single-particle formalism.
In this work, we introduce a new approach for constructing a renormalized and regularized Fock matrix for self-consistent field calculations. The scheme relies on second-order perturbation theory and is conceptually related to quasiparticle self-consistent second-order Green's function theory (GF2). The regularization is derived within the framework of perturbative similarity renormalization group (SRG) theory. By optimizing both the regularization and spin-scaling parameters, we introduce three SRG-qsGF2 variants that enable accurate predictions of quasiparticle energies and dipole moments. Lastly, we demonstrate that formulating second-order perturbation theory for the total electronic energy using the renormalized SRG-qsGF2 Fock matrix as the unperturbed Hamiltonian mitigates divergence problems commonly observed in conventional Møller--Plesset perturbation theory.
In this work, we develop two many-body quantum electrodynamic methods to calculate the ground-state energies of strongly coupled light-matter molecular systems. Specifically, we extend the second-order many-body Green's function theory (GF2) for electronic systems to incorporate electron-boson couplings. We employ two ansätze to treat the bosonic part of the system, namely the coherent-state (CS) and Lang-Firsov (LF) transformed vacuum state. These are combined with the GF2 method to construct two new approaches, which we refer to as CS-GF2 and LF-GF2. We benchmark CS- and LF-GF2 by studying various molecular systems inside an optical cavity. We investigate H2\mathrm{H}_2H2​ and LiH\mathrm{LiH}LiH potential energy surfaces, keto-enol tautomerization energy barrier, van der Waals interactions between two H2\mathrm{H_2}H2​ molecules and the torsional potential energy surface of the ethylene molecule, C2H4\mathrm{C_2H_4}C2​H4​. Both methods provide similar energy profiles, with relatively small differences between CS-GF2 and LF-GF2. Comparisons with the reference calculations also reveal remaining limitations at stretched bond lengths and near the twisted ethylene configuration. We additionally benchmark CS-GF2 against exact diagonalization for a two-site Hubbard-Holstein model and observe that it closely reproduces the coupling-induced energy change in the weakly interacting regime while improving upon CS-MP2 in the strongly interacting regime. Overall, the results demonstrate that CS-GF2 and LF-GF2 provide self-consistent descriptions of correlated molecular electron-boson systems, offering a many-body Green's function alternative for studying ground-state cavity-modified systems.
The second-order Green's function method (GF2) was shown recently to be an accurate self-consistent approach for electronic structure of correlated systems since the self-energy accounts for both the weak and some of the strong correlation. The numerical scaling of GF2 is quite steep however, O(N5)O({N^5})O(N5) (where the pre-factor is often hundreds), effectively preventing its application to large systems. Here, we develop a stochastic approach to GF2 (sGF2) where the self-energy is evaluated by a random-vector decomposition of Green's functions so that the dominant part of the calculation scales quasi linearly with system size. A study of hydrogen chains shows that the resulting approach is numerically efficient and accurate, as the stochastic errors are very small, 0.05% of the correlation energy for large systems with only a moderate computational effort. The method also yields automatically efficient MP2 energies and is automatically temperature dependent.