We present a reduced-scaling auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) framework designed for large molecular systems and ensembles, with or without coupling to optical cavities. Our approach leverages the natural block sparsity of the Cholesky decomposition (CD) of electron repulsion integrals in molecular ensembles and employs tensor hypercontraction (THC) to efficiently compress low-rank Cholesky blocks. By representing the Cholesky vectors in a mixed format, keeping high-rank blocks in block-sparse form and compressing low-rank blocks with THC, we reduce the scaling of exchange-energy evaluation from quartic to robust cubic in the number of molecular orbitals N, while lowering memory from cubic toward quadratic. Benchmark analyses on one-, two-, and three-dimensional molecular ensembles (up to ∼1,200 orbitals) show that (a) the number of nonzeros in Cholesky tensors grows linearly with system size across dimensions; (b) the average numerical rank increases sublinearly and does not saturate at these sizes; and (c) rank heterogeneity─some blocks nearly full rank and many low rank, naturally motivates the proposed mixed block sparsity and THC scheme for efficient calculation of exchange energy. We demonstrate that the mixed scheme yields cubic wall-time scaling with favorable prefactors and preserves AFQMC accuracy.
We present a reduced-scaling auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) framework designed for large molecular systems and ensembles, with or without coupling to optical cavities. Our approach leverages the natural block sparsity of the Cholesky decomposition (CD) of electron repulsion integrals in molecular ensembles and employs tensor hypercontraction (THC) to efficiently compress low-rank Cholesky blocks. By representing the Cholesky vectors in a mixed format, keeping high-rank blocks in block-sparse form and compressing low-rank blocks with THC, we reduce the scaling of exchange-energy evaluation from quartic to robust cubic in the number of molecular orbitals N, while lowering memory from cubic toward quadratic. Benchmark analyses on one-, two-, and three-dimensional molecular ensembles (up to ∼1,200 orbitals) show that (a) the number of nonzeros in Cholesky tensors grows linearly with system size across dimensions; (b) the average numerical rank increases sublinearly and does not saturate at these sizes; and (c) rank heterogeneity─some blocks nearly full rank and many low rank, naturally motivates the proposed mixed block sparsity and THC scheme for efficient calculation of exchange energy. We demonstrate that the mixed scheme yields cubic wall-time scaling with favorable prefactors and preserves AFQMC accuracy.
Phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) has recently emerged as a promising method for the production of benchmark-level simulations of medium- to large-sized molecules because of its accuracy and favorable polynomial scaling with system size. Unfortunately, the memory footprints of standard energy evaluation algorithms are nontrivial, which can significantly impact timings on graphical processing units (GPUs) where memory is limited. Previous attempts to reduce scaling by taking advantage of the low-rank structure of the Coulombic integrals have been successful but exhibit high prefactors, making their utility limited to very large systems. Here we present a complementary cubic-scaling route to reduce memory and computational scaling based on the low rank of the Coulombic interactions between localized orbitals, focusing on the application to ph-AFQMC. We show that the error due to this approximation, which we term localized-orbital AFQMC (LO-AFQMC), is systematic and controllable via a single variable and that the method is computationally favorable even for small systems. We present results demonstrating robust retention of accuracy versus both experiment and full ph-AFQMC for a variety of test cases chosen for their potential difficulty for localized-orbital-based methods, including the singlet–triplet gaps of the polyacenes benzene through pentacene, the heats of formation for a set of Platonic hydrocarbon cages, and the total energy of ferrocene, Fe(Cp) 2 . Finally, we reproduce our previous result for the gas-phase ionization energy of Ni(Cp) 2, agreeing with full ph-AFQMC to within statistical error while using less than 1/15th of the computer time.
We explore the use of the stochastic resolution-of-the-identity (sRI) with the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) method. sRI is combined with four existing local energy evaluation strategies in ph-AFQMC, namely, (1) the half-rotated electron repulsion integral tensor (HR), (2) Cholesky decomposition (CD), (3) tensor hypercontraction (THC), or (4) low-rank factorization (LR). We demonstrate that HR–sRI achieves no scaling reduction, CD–sRI scales as O(N3), and THC–sRI and LR–sRI scale as O(N2), albeit with a potentially large prefactor. Furthermore, the walker-specific extra memory requirement in CD is reduced from O(N3) to O(N2) with sRI, while sRI-based THC and LR algorithms lead to a reduction from O(N2) extra memory to O(N). Based on numerical results for one-dimensional hydrogen chains and water clusters, we demonstrated that, along with the use of a variance reduction technique, CD–sRI achieves cubic-scaling without overhead. In particular, we find that for the systems studied, the observed scaling of standard CD is O(N3–4), while for CD–sRI, it is reduced to O(N2–3). Once a memory bottleneck is reached, we expect THC–sRI and LR–sRI to be preferred methods due to their quadratic-scaling memory requirements and their quadratic-scaling of the local energy evaluation (with a potentially large prefactor). The theoretical framework developed here should facilitate large-scale ph-AFQMC applications that were previously difficult or impossible to carry out with standard computational resources.
Auxiliary Field Quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) has emerged as a powerful framework for treating strongly correlated electronic systems, offering a favorable balance between computational cost and accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel AFQMC method that uses the isometric tensor hypercontraction (ITHC) technique to diagonalize the two-body Coulomb interaction of molecular electronic Hamiltonians by introducing additional fictitious fermionic modes. Our method shows reduced theoretical complexity and better practical performance for both propagation and local energy evaluation compared to the standard AFQMC method. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by computing the ground-state energies of a linear $\ce{H10}$-chain and the benzene molecule. Our results show that the extended-basis AFQMC recovers many-body correlations with a precision comparable to that of high-level wavefunction methods such as Coupled Clusters (CC) or Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG), while offering significantly improved scaling.
We describe an algorithm to reduce the cost of auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) calculations for the electronic structure problem. The technique uses a nested low-rank factorization of the electron repulsion integral (ERI). While the cost of conventional AFQMC calculations in Gaussian bases scales as, where N is the size of the basis, we show that ground-state energies can be computed through tensor decomposition with reduced memory requirements and subquartic scaling. The algorithm is applied to hydrogen chains and square grids, water clusters, and hexagonal BN. In all cases, we observe significant memory savings and, for larger systems, reduced, subquartic simulation time.
auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) is a systematically improvable many-body method, but its application to extended solids has been severely limited by unfavorable computational scaling and memory requirements that obstruct rigorous access to the thermodynamic and complete-basis-set limits. By combining tensor hypercontraction with k -point symmetry, we reduce the computational and memory scaling of AFQMC for solids to O ( N 3 ) and O ( N 2 ) , respectively, with an arbitrary basis, comparable to diffusion Monte Carlo. This enables simultaneous, controlled extrapolation of full-system AFQMC calculations to the thermodynamic and complete-basis-set limits across insulating, metallic, and strongly correlated solids, without embedding, local approximations, empirical finite-size corrections, or composite schemes. Our results establish AFQMC as a general-purpose, systematically improvable alternative to diffusion Monte Carlo and coupled-cluster methods for predictive simulations of solids, enabling accurate energies and magnetic observables within a unified framework.
A constant goal of quantum chemistry is devising accurate and computationally effective methods for molecular simulations. In this work an application of tensor decompositions in the context of highly accurate coupled cluster theory, which is often considered a "gold standard", is investigated. The scheme we develop is aimed to mitigate the steep growth of the computational cost with the system size, and hence to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" common in many potent methods in electronic structure. We show how to reduce the computational effort of the restricted coupled cluster with singles and doubles (RCCSD) by two orders of magnitude by introducing alternative parameterizations of the method using "canonical polyad decomposition" (CPD) and "tensor hypercontraction" (THC) formats. After describing CPD and THC formats in detail, we demonstrate how to cast regular index based tensors into a decomposed form. The number of parameters and the accuracy of these representations depend on the expansion length (rank) of the approximation. We investigate the dependence of rank upon the size of the system and a target accuracy and show it to be low for typical tensors in electronic structure. We then provide a generic procedure to reformulate any coupled cluster method using tensor decompositions. Two specific approximate methods, THC-RCCSD and CPD-RCCSD, are derived. We demonstrate the accuracy of these new approaches by calculating energies of a large set of organic molecules, as well as by simulations of Hubbard models. Finally, it is shown how the restriction of the number of parameters in approximate coupled cluster can improve the accuracy in the challenging strong correlation regime. We conclude by discussing a connection of our findings to other new developments in the coupled cluster theory and propose possible extensions of our approach.