Abstract Model Hamiltonians are regularly derived from first principles to describe correlated matter. However, the standard methods for this contain a number of largely unexplored approximations. For a strongly correlated impurity model system, here we carefully compare a standard downfolding technique with the best possible ground-truth estimates for charge-neutral excited-state energies and wave functions using state-of-the-art first-principles many-body wave function approaches. To this end, we use the vanadocene molecule and analyze all downfolding aspects, including the Hamiltonian form, target basis, double-counting correction, and Coulomb interaction screening models. We find that the choice of target-space basis functions emerges as a key factor for the quality of the downfolded results, while orbital-dependent double-counting corrections diminish the quality. Background screening of the Coulomb interaction matrix elements primarily affects crystal-field excitations. Our benchmark uncovers the relative importance of each downfolding step and offers insights into the potential accuracy of minimal downfolded model Hamiltonians.
We check the accuracy of the constrained random phase approximation (cRPA) downfolding scheme by considering one-dimensional two- and three-orbital Hubbard models with a target band at the Fermi level and one or two screening bands away from the Fermi level. Using numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the full and downfolded model, we demonstrate that depending on filling, the effective interaction in the low-energy theory is either barely screened or antiscreened, in contrast to the cRPA prediction. This observation is explained by a functional renormalization group analysis, which shows that the cRPA contribution to the screening is to a large extent canceled by other diagrams in the direct particle-hole channel. We comment on the implications of this finding for the ab initio estimation of interaction parameters in low-energy descriptions of solids.
The accurate first-principles description of strongly correlated materials is an important and challenging problem in condensed matter physics. Ab initio downfolding has emerged as a way of deriving compressed many-body Hamiltonians that maintain the essential physics of strongly correlated materials. The solution of these material-specific models is still exponentially difficult to generate on classical computers, but quantum algorithms allow for a significant speed-up in obtaining the ground states of these compressed Hamiltonians. Here, we demonstrate that using quantum algorithms to obtain the properties of downfolded Hamiltonians can indeed yield high-fidelity solutions. By combining ab initio downfolding and variational quantum eigensolvers, we correctly predict the antiferromagnetic state of one-dimensional cuprate
Ca2CuO3, the excitonic ground state of monolayer
WTe2, and the charge-ordered state of correlated metal
SrVO3. Numerical simulations using a classical tensor network implementation of variational quantum eigensolvers allow us to simulate large models with up to 54 qubits and encompassing up to four bands in the correlated subspace, which is indicative of the complexity that our framework can address. Through these methods we demonstrate the potential of classical preoptimization and downfolding techniques for enabling efficient materials simulation using quantum algorithms.
In a previous work [Phys. Rev. B 77, 085122 (2008)], a procedure for constructing low-energy models of electrons in solids was proposed. The procedure starts with dividing the Hilbert space into two subspaces: the low-energy part (``
d space'') and the rest of the space (``
r space''). The low-energy model is constructed for the
d space by eliminating the degrees of freedom of the
r space. The thus derived model contains the strength of electron correlation expressed by a partially screened Coulomb interaction, calculated in the constrained random-phase approximation (cRPA), where screening channels within the
d space,
Pd, are subtracted. One conceptual problem of this established downfolding method is that for entangled bands it is not clear how to cut out the
d space and how to distinguish
Pd from the total polarization. Here, we propose a simple procedure to overcome this difficulty. The
d space is defined to be an isolated set of bands generated from a set of maximally localized Wannier basis, which consequently defines
Pd. The
r subspace is constructed as the complementary space orthogonal to the
d subspace, resulting in two sets of completely disentangled bands. Using these disentangled bands, the effective parameters of the
d space are uniquely determined by the cRPA method. The method is successfully applied to
3d transition metals.
In this chapter, we discuss how low-energy models can be derived from first-principle calculations. The main quantity to be determined is the effective Coulomb interaction between the electrons in the low-energy subspace, the so-called Hubbard U. We begin by giving a brief historical introduction to different ways to determine U. However, the main focus in the chapter lies on the constrained random-phase approximation (cRPA), which is a method to compute U based on the concept of partial screening. At the end of the chapter, we put the cRPA in a broader perspective by introducing the multi-tier approach, which is a general approach for downfolding that naturally encompasses the cRPA in the first step.
Point defects are of interest for many applications, from quantum sensing to modifying bulk properties of materials. Because of their localized orbitals, the electronic states are often strongly correlated, which has led to a proliferation of quantum embedding techniques to treat this correlation. In these techniques, most of the one-body states are treated with a weakly correlated theory such as density functional theory, and certain one-body states are singled out as an active space to be treated using an effective interaction. We assess these techniques for iron and chromium defects in aluminum nitride using quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations on identical Hamiltonians. For these systems, we find the dominant errors in the embedding arise from the one-body crystal-field splitting in the d orbitals inherited from density functional theory (DFT), rather than double counting corrections, with the screened interactions also affected by the DFT orbitals. Strikingly, the best double counting recipe is opposite in these two cases. Because excitation energies can agree while the underlying wave functions do not, diagnosing these errors requires detailed information about the many-body wave functions, which QMC provides.
We propose a way of obtaining effective low energy Hubbard-like model Hamiltonians from ab initio quantum Monte Carlo calculations for molecular and extended systems. The Hamiltonian parameters are fit to best match the ab initio two-body density matrices and energies of the ground and excited states, and thus we refer to the method as ab initio density matrix based downfolding. For benzene (a finite system), we find good agreement with experimentally available energy gaps without using any experimental inputs. For graphene, a two dimensional solid (extended system) with periodic boundary conditions, we find the effective on-site Hubbard U(∗)/t to be 1.3 ± 0.2, comparable to a recent estimate based on the constrained random phase approximation. For molecules, such parameterizations enable calculation of excited states that are usually not accessible within ground state approaches. For solids, the effective Hamiltonian enables large-scale calculations using techniques designed for lattice models.