The contracted Schr\"odinger equation (CSE) technique through its direct determination of the two-particle reduced density matrix (2RDM) without the wave function may offer a fresh alternative to traditional many-body quantum calculations. Without additional information the CSE, also known as the density equation, cannot be solved for the 2RDM because it also requires a knowledge of the 4RDM. We provide theoretical foundations through a reconstruction theorem for recent attempts at generating higher RDMs from the 2RDM to remove the indeterminacy of the CSE. With Grassmann algebra a more concise representation for Valdemoro's reconstruction functionals [F. Colmenero, C. Perez del Valle, and C. Valdemoro, Phys. Rev. A 47, 971 (1993)] is presented. From the perspective of the particle-hole equivalence we obtain Nakatsuji and Yasuda's correction for the 4RDM formula [H. Nakatsuji and K. Yasuda, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 1039 (1996)] as well as a corrective approach for the 3RDM functional. A different reconstruction strategy, the ensemble representability method (ERM), is introduced to build the 3- and 4-RDMs by enforcing four-ensemble representability and contraction conditions. We derive the CSE in second quantization without Valdemoro's matrix contraction mapping and offer the first proof of Nakatsuji's theorem for the second-quantized CSE. Both the functional and ERM reconstruction strategies are employed with the CSE to solve for the energies and the 2RDMs of a quasispin model without wave functions. We elucidate the iterative solution of the CSE through an analogy with the power method for eigenvalue equations. Resulting energies of the CSE methods are comparable to single-double configuration-interaction (SDCI) energies, and the 2RDMs are more accurate by an order of magnitude than those from SDCI. While the CSE has been applied to systems with 14 electrons, we present results for as many as 40 particles. Results indicate that the 2RDM remains accurate as the number of particles increases. We also report a direct determination of excited-state 2RDMs through the CSE. By circumventing the wave function, the CSE presents new possibilities for treating electron correlation.
In this paper two fundamental questions in the contracted Schr\"odinger equation (CSE) approach are considered by using Lipkin's quasispin model: 1-1 mapping between the second-order reduced density matrix (2-RDM) and the wave function of an excited state, and the uniqueness of the solution of CSE under incomplete N-representability conditions. We present some examples of the wave functions that give the same 2-RDM as the excited state. Thus 2-RDM of an excited state does not determine the wave function uniquely, and it alone cannot be used as basic variable for excited states of the density-matrix theory. Under the incomplete representability constraints the solution of the second-order CSE contains all the exact 4-RDMs together with the spurious ones. We examined the distribution of the solutions as a function of energy, and found that the solutions are well separated from each other under the P- and G-representability conditions of 4-RDM in the low-energy region, but with moderate interaction, or in the higher-energy region, there exist spurious solutions for almost all energies. Thus the G condition of 4-RDM is not sufficient to solve the excited states, although it gives accurate results for the ground state of Lipkin's model.
A purification procedure that simultaneously corrects the
N- and
S-representability main defects of a second-order reduced density matrix (2RDM), second-order hole reduced density matrix (2HRDM), and second-order
G matrix is presented here. In this purifying procedure, the generalized unitarily invariant second-order matrix decomposition [D. R. Alcoba, Int. J. Quantum Chem. 97, 776 (2004)] for the 2RDM and the 2HRDM as well as for the
G matrix is combined with the
S-representability conditions. In particular, here we will focus our attention on the RDMs corresponding to doublet states. We will thus explicitly give the
S-representability conditions that a two-body correlation matrix has to satisfy when an
N-electron system is in a doublet spin-state in the spin-component of maximum projection. Furthermore, as a consequence of the
G-matrix spin properties (which directly affect the
S-representability of the 2RDM), we show that a different contracting form for the 2RDM is possible. The numerical results presented in this work confirm the efficiency of our purifying procedure.
The electronic energy of a system of fermions can be obtained from the second-order reduced density matrix through the contracted Schrödinger equation or its anti-Hermitian counterpart. Both energy expressions depend on the third-order reduced density matrix (3-RDM) which is usually approximated from lower-order densities. The accuracy of these methods depends critically on the set of N-representability conditions enforced in the calculation and the quality of the approximate 3-RDM. There are no benchmark studies including most 3-RDM approximations and, thus far, no assessment of the deterioration of the approximations with correlation effects has been performed. In this paper we introduce a series of tests to assess the performance of 3-RDM approximations in a model system with varying electron correlation effects, the three-electron harmonium atom. The results of this work put forward several limitations of the currently most used 3-RDM approximations for systems with important electron correlation effects.
The latest results of density matrix theory are summarized in terms of analysis of off-diagonal components. For a given reduced density matrix (RDM) of arbitrary order, the full density matrix is explicitly constructed, from which the RDM is derived by means of the corresponding reduction procedure. Both the matrices satisfy all the necessary conditions, such antisymmetry, normalization, hermiticity, except that the non-negative definiteness of the full DM is not guaranteed. If an RDM satisfies the necessary inequalities with the same number of indices as it has itself, then, as proved here, there is an additive correction to the full DM matrix that turns it into a non-negative definite matrix leading to the same RDM and satisfying the other requirements. This establishes a fundamental fact that these inequalities are sufficient as well, providing the N-representability of the given RDM. The construction is based on the classification, introduced in the article, of the multi-index elements of the RDM and full DM according to their degree of off-diagonality. RDM elements with a predetermined degree of off-diagonality are expressed through full DM elements with the same off-diagonality. This shows that the conventional variational approach to calculating the energy of the system by convex programming methods under the conditions of N-representability (before and even after reaching the minimum energy) generally does not lead to constructing a mixed quantum state composed of solutions to the Schrödinger equation. Therefore, except for the energy, it does not guarantee a correct description of the other properties so long as the conditions of correctness for each particular property are not expressed in terms of the RDM and not incorporated into the specific conditions of N-representability (regardless of the requirement of energy minimization).