Spin adaptation of the cumulant expansions of reduced density matrices
Julia Liebert, Christian Schilling, David A. Mazziotti
We develop a systematic framework for the spin adaptation of the cumulants of p-particle reduced density matrices (RDMs), with explicit constructions for p = 1 to 3. These spin-adapted cumulants enable rigorous treatment of both Ŝz and Ŝ2 symmetries in quantum systems, providing a foundation for spin-resolved electronic structure methods. We show that complete spin adaptation-referred to as completeS-representability-can be enforced by constraining the variances of Ŝz and Ŝ2, which require the 2-RDM and 4-RDM, respectively. Importantly, the cumulants of RDMs scale linearly with system size-size-extensive-making them a natural object for incorporating spin symmetries in scalable electronic structure theories. The developed formalism is applicable to density-based methods, one-particle RDM functional theories, and two-particle RDM methods. We further extend the approach to spin-orbit-coupled systems via total angular momentum adaptation. Beyond spin, the framework enables the adaptation of RDM theories to additional symmetries through the construction of suitable irreducible tensor operators.
arXiv:2505.16989•The Journal of Chemical Physics•Jul 23, 2025•0 citations