Variational quantum Monte Carlo (VMC) method applied to interacting electron systems has played a pivotal role for the studies of electronic states of atoms, molecules and condensed matters. First, the many-body wave functions optimized by the VMC method provide good guiding functions in more accurate, diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations for identical systems. Second, the VMC calculations themselves can give a good upper bound for the exact ground-state energy of many-electron systems when an appropriate form for the variational wave function is employed. In addition to a conventional form for the variational wave function that is expressed by the product of the Jastrow factor and the single Slater determinant, recent investigations have found that the expression in terms of many Slater determinants can provide a very accurate description of electronic states, especially for intrinsically multi-reference systems, which corresponds to the configuration interaction (CI) expansion method in conventional quantum chemistry. Although the CI method needs an extremely large number of expansion coefficients as variational parameters, the number of parameters can be reduced efficiently by using an idea of (molecular) orbital pair correlations. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the feasibility and usefulness of this idea within the framework of VMC method with the Jastrow–Slater wave function, where the ground state of a water molecule is investigated as a test case. In this study we rely on a variational wave function composed of a product of the Jastrow and Slater parts as 1⁄4 J S; ð1Þ
Variational quantum Monte Carlo (VMC) method applied to interacting electron systems has played a pivotal role for the studies of electronic states of atoms, molecules and condensed matters. First, the many-body wave functions optimized by the VMC method provide good guiding functions in more accurate, diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations for identical systems. Second, the VMC calculations themselves can give a good upper bound for the exact ground-state energy of many-electron systems when an appropriate form for the variational wave function is employed. In addition to a conventional form for the variational wave function that is expressed by the product of the Jastrow factor and the single Slater determinant, recent investigations have found that the expression in terms of many Slater determinants can provide a very accurate description of electronic states, especially for intrinsically multi-reference systems, which corresponds to the configuration interaction (CI) expansion method in conventional quantum chemistry. Although the CI method needs an extremely large number of expansion coefficients as variational parameters, the number of parameters can be reduced efficiently by using an idea of (molecular) orbital pair correlations. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the feasibility and usefulness of this idea within the framework of VMC method with the Jastrow–Slater wave function, where the ground state of a water molecule is investigated as a test case. In this study we rely on a variational wave function composed of a product of the Jastrow and Slater parts as 1⁄4 J S; ð1Þ
Quantum Monte Carlo methods are accurate and promising many body techniques for electronic structure calculations which, in the last years, are encountering a growing interest thanks to their favorable scaling with the system size and their efficient parallelization, particularly suited for the modern high performance computing facilities. The ansatz of the wave function and its variational flexibility are crucial points for both the accurate description of molecular properties and the capabilities of the method to tackle large systems. In this paper, we extensively analyze, using different variational ansatzes, several properties of the water molecule, namely, the total energy, the dipole and quadrupole momenta, the ionization and atomization energies, the equilibrium configuration, and the harmonic and fundamental frequencies of vibration. The investigation mainly focuses on variational Monte Carlo calculations, although several lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo calculations are also reported. Through a systematic study, we provide a useful guide to the choice of the wave function, the pseudopotential, and the basis set for QMC calculations. We also introduce a new method for the computation of forces with finite variance on open systems and a new strategy for the definition of the atomic orbitals involved in the Jastrow-Antisymmetrised Geminal power wave function, in order to drastically reduce the number of variational parameters. This scheme significantly improves the efficiency of QMC energy minimization in case of large basis sets.
Quantum Monte Carlo methods are accurate and promising many body techniques for electronic structure calculations which, in the last years, are encountering a growing interest thanks to their favorable scaling with the system size and their efficient parallelization, particularly suited for the modern high performance computing facilities. The ansatz of the wave function and its variational flexibility are crucial points for both the accurate description of molecular properties and the capabilities of the method to tackle large systems. In this paper, we extensively analyze, using different variational ansatzes, several properties of the water molecule, namely: the total energy, the dipole and quadrupole momenta, the ionization and atomization energies, the equilibrium configuration, and the harmonic and fundamental frequencies of vibration. The investigation mainly focuses on variational Monte Carlo calculations, although several lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo calculations are also reported. Through a systematic study, we provide a useful guide to the choice of the wave function, the pseudo potential, and the basis set for QMC calculations. We also introduce a new strategy for the definition of the atomic orbitals involved in the Jastrow - Antisymmetrised Geminal power wave function, in order to drastically reduce the number of variational parameters. This scheme significantly improves the efficiency of QMC energy minimization in case of large basis sets.
Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods such as variational Monte Carlo and fixed node diffusion Monte Carlo depend heavily on the quality of the trial wave function. Although Slater-Jastrow wave functions are the most commonly used variational ansatz in electronic structure, more sophisticated wave functions are critical to ascertaining new physics. One such wave function is the multi-Slater-Jastrow wave function which consists of a Jastrow function multiplied by the sum of Slater determinants. In this paper we describe a method for working with these wave functions in QMC codes that is easy to implement, efficient both in computational speed as well as memory, and easily parallelized. The computational cost scales quadratically with particle number making this scaling no worse than the single determinant case and linear with the total number of excitations. Additionally, we implement this method and use it to compute the ground state energy of a water molecule.
Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods such as variational Monte Carlo and fixed node diffusion Monte Carlo depend heavily on the quality of the trial wave function. Although Slater-Jastrow wave functions are the most commonly used variational ansatz in electronic structure, more sophisticated wave functions are critical to ascertaining new physics. One such wave function is the multi-Slater-Jastrow wave function which consists of a Jastrow function multiplied by the sum of Slater determinants. In this paper we describe a method for working with these wave functions in QMC codes that is easy to implement, efficient both in computational speed as well as memory, and easily parallelized. The computational cost scales quadratically with particle number making this scaling no worse than the single determinant case and linear with the total number of excitations. Additionally, we implement this method and use it to compute the ground state energy of a water molecule.
With the ability to solve the many-body Schrödinger equation accurately, in principle all physics and chemistry could be derived from first principles. However, exact wave functions of realistic and interesting systems are in general unavailable because they are non-deterministic polynomial-hard to compute (Troyer, 2005). This implies that we need to rely on approximations. The variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method is widely used for ground state studies, but requires a trial wave function ansatz which must trade off between efficiency and accuracy. The method also has many common features with machine learning algorithms, and as neural networks have shown impressive power as function approximators, the idea is to use a neural network as the trial wave function guess. For fermionic systems, like electronic structure systems, the wave function needs to obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. This is typically achieved using a Slater determinant. As a neural network hardly can model this feature, our approach is to replace the single-particle functions in the Slater determinant with restricted Boltzmann machines, getting the RBM ansatz. In addition, we add further correlations via so-called Jastrow factors (Drummond, 2004). The de facto standard trial wave function ansatz for electronic structure calculations is the Slater-Jastrow ansatz, which was implemented as a reference. Our primary focus is on closed-shell circular quantum dots, where we compute the ground state energy and electron density of two-dimensional systems with up to 90 electrons and three-dimensional systems with up to 70 electrons. The energy obtained by the RBM ansatz was reasonably close to experimental results, and it gradually became closer as we added more complex correlation factors. For our most complicated Jastrow factor, the energy was found to be lower than the energy provided by the Slater-Jastrow ansatz for small dots, but for larger dots it was slightly higher. However, the one-body density profile reveals that the RBM ansatz gives more distinctly located electrons compared to the Slater-Jastrow ansatz. This can be explained by the way the RBM ansatz models the correlations. From the two-body density profile, we also observe that the repulsive interactions get more significant as we add a Jastrow factor. Based on the electron densities and the energy distribution between kinetic and potential energy, it is certain that the various methods provide different electron configurations. For low-frequency dots, the electron density becomes more localized with an additional radial peak compared to high-frequency dots. This is reminiscent of what is known as Wigner localization (Ghosal, 2007). The computational time consumption was found to be favorable for the RBM ansatz for small systems and the Slater-Jastrow ansatz for large systems. This can be explained by the exploding number of variational parameters in the RBM ansatz as the system sizes increase. The RBM ansatz with Jastrow factors were notably more computationally intensive than the other ansätze, and evidently, there is no reason to use the simplest Jastrow factor when more complicated Jastrow factors are available.
We present an algorithm for calculating the local energy of a multi-Slater wave function in orbital space quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). Recent developments in selected configuration interaction methods have led to increased interest in using multi-Slater trial wave functions in various QMC methods. For an ab initio Hamiltonian, our algorithm has a cost scaling of O(n5 + nc), as opposed to the O(n4nc) scaling of existing orbital space algorithms, where n is the system size and nc is the number of configurations in the wave function. We present our method using variational Monte Carlo calculations with the Jastrow multi-Slater wave function, although the formalism should be applicable for auxiliary field QMC. We apply it to polyacetylene and demonstrate the possibility of using a much larger number of configurations than possible using existing methods.