Ground-state two-particle reduced density matrices (2-RDMs) are used to calculate excited-state energy spectra. Solving the Schrodinger equation for excited states dominated by single excitations from the ground-state wavefunction requires the ground-state 2- and 3-RDMs. The excited states, however, can be obtained without a knowledge of the ground-state 3-RDM by two methods: (i) cumulant expansion methods which build the 3-RDM from the 2-RDM, and (ii) double commutator methods which eliminate the 3-RDM. Previous work [Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. A 68, 052501 (2003)] examined the accuracy of excited states extracted from ground-state 2-RDMs, which were calculated by full configuration interaction or the variational 2-RDM method. In this work we employ (i) advances in semidefinite programming to treat the excited states of water and hydrogen fluoride and chains of hydrogen atoms, and (ii) the addition of partial three-particle N-representability conditions to compute more accurate ground-state 2-RDMs. With the hydrogen chains we examine the metal-to-insulator transition as measured by the band gap (the difference between the ground-state and the first excited-state energies), which is difficult for excited-state methods to capture.
A recent advance in the theory of the contracted Schr\"odinger equation (CSE), in which only the anti-Hermitian part of the equation is solved, permits the direct determination of ground-state two-electron reduced density matrices (2-RDM's) that yield 95%--100% of the correlation energy of atoms and molecules [D. A. Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 143002 (2006)]. Here we discuss in detail the anti-Hermitian contracted Schr\"odinger equation (ACSE) and its comparison to the CSE with regard to cumulant reconstruction of RDM's, the role of Nakatsuji's theorem, and the structure of the wave function. The ACSE is also formulated in the Heisenberg representation and related to canonical diagonalization. The solution of the ACSE is illustrated with a variety of molecules including
H2O,
CH2,
NH4+,
HF, and
N2, and potential energy and dipole-moment surfaces are computed for boron hydride in a polarized double-$\ensuremath{\zeta}$ basis set. The computed 2-RDM's very closely satisfy known
N-representability conditions.
Two-electron reduced density matrices (2-RDMs) of many-electron molecules are directly determined without calculation of their wave functions by solving the anti-Hermitian contracted Schrödinger equation. Approximation of the 3-RDM in the anti-Hermitian contracted Schrödinger equation by a corrected cumulant expansion [Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. A 60, 3618 (1999)] permits the direct calculation of the energy and 2-RDM with many high-order correlation effects included. The method is illustrated for the molecules BeH2, H2O, NH3, CH4, and CO as well as the dissociation of BH. Correlation energies are obtained within 95%-100% of full-configuration interaction, and 2-RDMs very nearly satisfy known N-representability conditions.
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.
Quantum phase transitions are explored with reduced-density-matrix (RDM) mechanics. While in wave mechanics the quantum phase transition is identified by a crossing or avoided crossing between ground- and excited-state energies, in RDM mechanics the transition is characterized by movement of the ground-state two-electron RDM (2-RDM) along the boundary of the convex set of 2-RDMs between regions with dramatically different expectation values (order parameters) of one or more operators. With recent advances the ground-state 2-RDM can be directly computed without the many-particle wave function by variational optimization of the energy with the 2-RDM [D. A. Mazziotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 213001 (2004)]. Because the variational calculation of the 2-RDM does not depend on a reference wave function, it can accurately predict the energies and properties of a system both near and far from the quantum phase transition.
Atomic and molecular ground-state energies are variationally determined by constraining the two-particle reduced density matrix (2-RDM) to satisfy positivity conditions. Because each positivity condition corresponds to correcting the ground-state energies for a class of Hamiltonians with two-particle interactions, these conditions collectively provide a new approach to many-body theory that, unlike perturbation theory, can capture significantly correlated phenomena including the multireference effects of potential-energy surfaces. The D, Q, and G conditions for the 2-RDM are extended through generalized lifting operators inspired from the formal solution of N-representability. These lifted conditions agree with the hierarchy of positivity conditions presented by Mazziotti and Erdahl [Phys. Rev. A 63, 042113 (2001)]. The connection between positivity and the formal solution explains how constraining higher RDMs to be positive semidefinite improves the N representability of the 2-RDM and suggests using pieces of higher positivity conditions that computationally scale like the D condition. With the D, Q, and G conditions as well as pieces of higher positivity the electronic energies for Be, LiH,
H2O, and BH are computed through a primal-dual interior-point algorithm for positive semidefinite programming. The variational method produces potential-energy surfaces that are highly accurate even far from the equilibrium geometry where single-reference perturbation-based methods often fail to produce realistic energies.