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International Journal of Quantum Chemistry

Shannon entropy and many‐electron correlations: Theoretical concepts, numerical results, and Collins conjecture

Luigi Delle Site

Published Nov 28, 2014• 59 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this article, I will discuss the overlap between the concept of Shannon entropy and the concept of electronic correlation. Quantum Monte Carlo numerical results for the uniform electron gas are also presented; these latter on the one hand enhance the hypothesis of a direct link between the two concepts but on the other hand leave a series of open questions which may be used to trace a roadmap for the future research in the field. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

DOI
10.1002/qua.24823

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In this article, I will discuss the overlap between the concept of Shannon entropy and the concept of electronic correlation. Quantum Monte Carlo numerical results for the uniform electron gas are also presented; these latter on the one hand enhance the hypothesis of a direct link between the two concepts but on the other hand leave a series of open questions which may be used to trace a roadmap for the future research in the field. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
We consider a nearly (or quasi) uniform gas of interacting electrons for which spin statistics play a crucial role. A previously developed procedure, based on the extension of the Levy-Lieb constrained search principle and Monte Carlo sampling of electron configurations in space, allows us to approximate the form of the kinetic-energy functional. For a spinless electron gas, this procedure led to a correlation term, which had the form of the Shannon entropy, but the resulting kinetic-energy functional does not satisfy the Lieb-Thirring inequality, which is rigorous and one of the most general relations regarding the kinetic energy. In this paper, we show that when the fermionic character of the electrons is included via a statistical spin approach, our procedure leads to correlation terms, which also have the form of the Shannon entropy and the resulting kinetic-energy functional does satisfy the Lieb-Thirring inequality. In this way we further strengthen the connection between Shannon entropy and electron correlation and, more generally, between information theory and quantum mechanics.
In this work, we investigate the reliability of information-theoretic measures based on the electron-density and shape-function, specifically Shannon and Rényi entropies, as descriptors of electronic correlation. By establishing a rigorous decomposition of these entropic measures into additive and nonadditive contributions, supported on a Mulliken-like atomic partition of molecules, we systematically analyze the asymptotic behavior of the entropies at the infinite-internuclear-distance limit to assess the problem of static correlation and extensivity. Our algebraic and numerical analysis reveals several flaws in the use of these density-based descriptors. We demonstrate that for minimal-basis and different theoretical levels, the Shannon and Rényi entropies fail to encode the amount of static correlation conveyed by the underlying wavefunction. Conversely, shape-function Shannon entropies and Rényi entropies (for α≠1α\neq 1α=1) violate extensivity. In larger basis sets, uncorrelated Hartree-Fock densities consistently overestimate entropy compared to sufficiently correlated (e.g., full-valence-CAS) densities. Moreover, the entropies for insufficiently correlated methods violate extensivity. These findings indicate that electron-density-based measures are insufficient for capturing static correlation, suggesting that robust entropic descriptors should be constructed from higher-dimensional Hilbert-space objects.
In this paper, we have presented an analytical model of two electron systems consisting of a many particle correlated wave function with some variational parameters α, λ and µ and used it to quantify the electron-electron correlation described by the wave function containing explicitly r12 (inter atomic distance between two electrons) dependent term. The single particle wave functions and the charge densities have been extracted from the said correlated wave function both for the uncorrelated and correlated systems in coordinate space and its momentum analogs have been obtained by taking the Fourier transform of the coordinate analogs. We have computed and presented the results of the numerical values of the theoretic information entropies of the Shannon entropy, Fisher information entropy, Shannon power and the FisherShannon product. The numerical values are consistently found to satisfy the Beckner, Bialynicki-Birula and Mycielski (BBM ) inequality relation; Stam-Cramer-Rao inequalities or Fisher based uncertainty relation and Fisher-Shannon product relation for the uncorrelated and correlated systems in both the coordinate and momentum spaces.
Abstract Quantum Monte Carlo is an important and complementary alternative to density functional theory when performing computational electronic structure calculations in which high accuracy is required. The method has many attractive features for probing the electronic structure of real atoms, molecules and solids. In particular, it is a genuine many‐body theory with a natural and explicit description of electron correlation which gives consistent, highly‐accurate results while at the same time exhibiting favourable (cubic or better) scaling of computational cost with system size. This article is intended to provide a brief and hopefully accessible review of some relevant aspects of quantum Monte Carlo together with an outline of our implementation of it in the Cambridge computer code ‘CASINO’ [1, 2]. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)