The spin-adapted pth-order reduced Hamiltonians (SRH) are obtained for an m-electron system, within the formalism of second quantization. This transformation is applied to the usual many-body Hamiltonian and involves an augmenting mapping, a spin projection, and a reducing mapping into the p-body reduced space. These three operations are combined into a single algorithm, allowing the work to be carried out within the two-body space. The SRH matrices thus obtained (1) have the same trace as that of the corresponding full configuration-interaction (CI) matrix, and (2) can be written as expansions involving the p eigenvalues and the corresponding pth-order reduced density matrices (RDM) of the m-body system in the chosen spin symmetry. Both of these properties guarantee that all and only the relevant information about our system is contained in the SRH matrices (and the SRH operators). The excitations of the eigenstates of the 1-SRH and the 2-SRH can be interpreted as the normal modes (or elementary excitations) of our electronic system in a given symmetry. A preliminary calculation on the Be atom yields encouraging results when compared with experiment. In the following paper (paper II of this series) the theory is applied to obtain the total energy and the reduced density matrices.
General formulas for matrix elements of the pth-order spin-adapted reduced Hamiltonian (p-SRH) are derived based on the theory of generalized reduced density operators. The method is illustrated by a diagrammatic technique developed in detail for p=4. The p-SRH is a matrix representing a p-particle operator in a finite-dimensional p-particle Hilbert space. It is related to the N-particle (N\ensuremath{\ge}p) Hamiltonian defined in an N-particle spin-adapted, finite-dimensional Hilbert space. The p-SRH's, apart from their importance in theory of atomic and molecular structure, may find applications in statistical theories of spectra and in nuclear shell theory.
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 variational two-electron reduced-density-matrix (2-RDM) method computes the ground-state energy and 2-RDM of an atom or molecule without calculation of the many-electron wave function. Recently, the computational efficiency of the 2-RDM method has been significantly enhanced through the use of a first-order algorithm for semidefinite programming [Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 213001 (2004)]. In this paper we develop a spin- and symmetry-adapted formulation of the method that further improves its efficiency by incorporating both the spin and spatial symmetries of many-electron atoms and molecules. While previous work on density-matrix symmetry focused on only one form of the 2-RDM, the variational method employs three different forms of the 2-RDM, known as the
D,
Q, and
G matrices, to restrict the 2-RDM to be approximately
N-representable, that is representable by an
N-electron wave function. We apply spin symmetries to the three forms of the 2-RDM, each of which breaks into four diagonal spin-blocks, namely one singlet and three triplet blocks. If the molecules have point-group symmetry, each of the 2-RDMs may be further subdivided into smaller diagonal blocks according to the spatial symmetry of the basis functions. The subdivision of the 2-RDMs into diagonal blocks generates significant computational savings in both floating-point operations and memory storage. Calculations illustrate the computational savings. Spin adaptation also enforces the correct expectation value of the ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{S}}^{2}$ operator, which in earlier work is applied as a separate constraint.
An improved parametrization of the two-electron reduced density matrix (2-RDM) [D. A. Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 253002 (2008)] was recently shown to yield energies and properties that are markedly better than those calculated by traditional ab initio methods of similar computational scaling. In this paper a family of such energy functionals, generalizing the ones obtained previously, is derived through the use of (i)
p-particle contraction relations based on the contraction of the cumulant expansions of
p-particle RDMs and (ii) Cauchy-Schwarz relations that arise from an important set of
N-representability constraints known as the two-positivity conditions. The 2-RDMs are explicitly parameterized in terms of the first-order part of the cumulant 2-RDM and, for the inclusion of single excitations, a second-order part of the 1-RDM. In contrast to earlier formulations based on the coefficients from configuration interaction with single and double excitations (CISD), the cumulant-based parametric 2-RDM methods, from the properties of cumulants, are rigorously size extensive. We also show that writing the energy functionals in terms of correlated 1-RDMs and cumulant 2-RDMs reduces the computational cost of the parametric 2-RDM methods to that of CISD. Applications are made to ground-state energies of several molecules, equilibrium bond distances, and frequencies of HF,
F2, and CO, the relative energy of the cis and trans isomers of
HO3${}^{\ensuremath{-}}$, and the HCN-HNC isomerization reaction. For bond breaking in hydrogen fluoride the improved and more efficient parametric 2-RDM methods yield energies with similar accuracies at both equilibrium and nonequilibrium geometries in 6-31G** and polarized valence quadruple-$\ensuremath{\zeta}$ basis sets. Computed 2-RDMs very nearly satisfy well-known
N-representability conditions.