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The Journal of Chemical Physics

Ornstein–Uhlenbeck diffusion quantum Monte Carlo study on the bond lengths and harmonic frequencies of some first-row diatomic molecules

Shih‐I Lu

Published Feb 10, 2004• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This article accesses the performance of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion quantum Monte Carlo with regard to the calculation of molecular geometries and harmonic frequencies of H2, LiH, HF, Li2, LiF, CO, N2, and F2 molecules. A comparison of the results for the eight first-row diatomic molecules from experiments, CCSD(T)/6-311G(3df,3pd) and CCSD(T)/cc-pV5Z levels of theory as well as our work is given. The results presented show that quantum Monte Carlo is becoming powerful tools for ab initio electronic structure calculations.

DOI
10.1063/1.1639370

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This article accesses the performance of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion quantum Monte Carlo with regard to the calculation of molecular geometries and harmonic frequencies of H2, LiH, HF, Li2, LiF, CO, N2, and F2 molecules. A comparison of the results for the eight first-row diatomic molecules from experiments, CCSD(T)/6-311G(3df,3pd) and CCSD(T)/cc-pV5Z levels of theory as well as our work is given. The results presented show that quantum Monte Carlo is becoming powerful tools for ab initio electronic structure calculations.
This article describes an approach in determination of equilibrium geometries and harmonic frequencies of molecules by the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion quantum Monte Carlo method based on the floating spherical Gaussians. In conjunction with a projected and renormalized Hellmann-Feynman gradient and an electronic energy at variational Monte Carlo and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo, respectively, the quasi-Newton algorithm implemented with the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno updated Hessian was used to find the optimized molecular geometry. We applied this approach to N2 and H2O molecules. The geometry and harmonic frequencies calculated were consistent with some sophisticated ab initio calculated values within reasonable statistical uncertainty.
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This work investigates the accuracy of real-space quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for calculating molecular geometries. We present the equilibrium bond lengths of a test set of 30 diatomic molecules calculated using variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) methods. The effect of different trial wavefunctions is investigated using single determinants constructed from Hartree-Fock (HF) and Density Functional Theory (DFT) orbitals with LDA, PBE, and B3LYP functionals, as well as small multi-configurational self-consistent field (MCSCF) multi-determinant expansions. When compared to experimental geometries, all DMC methods exhibit smaller mean-absolute deviations (MADs) than those given by HF, DFT, and MCSCF. The most accurate MAD of 3 ± 2 × 10(-3) Å is achieved using DMC with a small multi-determinant expansion. However, the more computationally efficient multi-determinant VMC method has a similar MAD of only 4.0 ± 0.9 × 10(-3) Å, suggesting that QMC forces calculated from the relatively simple VMC algorithm may often be sufficient for accurate molecular geometries.
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Computation of ionic forces using quantum Monte Carlo methods has long been a challenge. We introduce a simple procedure, based on known properties of physical electronic densities, to make the variance of the Hellmann-Feynman estimator finite. We obtain very accurate geometries for the molecules H(2), LiH, CH(4), NH(3), H(2)O, and HF, with a Slater-Jastrow trial wave function. Harmonic frequencies for diatomics are also in good agreement with experiment. An antithetical sampling method is also discussed for additional reduction of the variance.