The Kernel Energy Method (KEM) delivers accurate full molecule energies using less computational resources than standard ab-initio quantum chemical approaches. KEM achieves this efficiency by decomposing a system of atoms into disjoint subsets called kernels. The results of full ab-initio calculations on each individual single kernel and on each double kernel formed by the union of each pair of single kernels are combined in an equation of a form that is specific to KEM to provide an approximation to the full molecule energy. KEM has been demonstrated to give accurate molecular energies over a wide range of systems, chemical methods and basis sets. The efficiency of KEM makes calculations on large systems tractable. It has been shown to be accurate for calculations on large biomolecules including proteins and DNA. KEM has recently been generalized to provide the one-body density matrix for the full molecule. This generalization greatly expands the utility of the method since the density matrix enables simple calculation of the expectation value of any observable associated with a one-body operator. More importantly, the generalization enables results from KEM to be constrained to satisfy essential quantum mechanical conditions. KEM is generalized to density matrices by taking the density matrices obtained from the single and double kernels and adapting them to the full molecule basis. These augmented kernel density matrices are summed according to the standard KEM expansion. This initial matrix does not necessarily correspond to a valid quantum mechanical N-electron wavefunction which is normalized and obeys the Pauli principle. Such a density matrix is called N-representable. N-representability is imposed on the initial matrix by using the Clinton equations, which deliver a single-determinant N-representable one-body density matrix. Single-determinant N-representability is ensured by enforcing the density matrix to be a normalized projector. Such normalized projectors are factorizable into matrices which deliver full molecule molecular orbitals. Although energies have been demonstrated to be accurate in the original energy expansion form of KEM, there is no requirement that the energy corresponds to the expectation value of a valid quantum mechanical wavefunction. Because of this, there is no requirement that the energies satisfy the variational theorem. Imposing single-determinant N-representability on the KEM density matrix by using the Clinton equations recovers the variational bound on the energy obtained from KEM. Recovery of the variational bound by the N-representable KEM density matrix has been demonstrated by calculations on several water clusters. Energies from full molecule restricted Hartree-Fock calculations were compared to energies obtained from the KEM energy expansion and to energies obtained from the KEM density matrix expansion which had N-representability imposed. In each case where the energy expansion gave energies that violated the variational bound the N-representable density matrix gave energies that satisfied the bound and in fact were more accurate than the simple energy expansion results. The effect of imposing N-representability on the KEM density matrix has also been investigated in the context of Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory (KS/DFT). Calculations on a simple noble gas system and a single water cluster were done. KS/DFT energies were compared to energies from the KEM energy expansion and energies associated with the KEM density matrix expansion on which N-representability was imposed. The energies from the KEM density matrix expansion made N-representable were more accurate than those obtained from straightforward KEM energy expansions in nearly all cases for the noble gas system. For the water cluster the accuracy of the energy obtained from the N-representable KEM density matrix was nearly four times closer to the energy calculated for the full system than the KEM energy expansion result. The Clinton-purified N-representable matrix obtained from the KEM density expansion can be used to calculate expectation values for any one-electron operator. In particular, a KEM density matrix approach can be used in the study of quantum crystallography.
The Kernel Energy Method (KEM) delivers accurate full molecule energies using less computational resources than standard ab-initio quantum chemical approaches. KEM achieves this efficiency by decomposing a system of atoms into disjoint subsets called kernels. The results of full ab-initio calculations on each individual single kernel and on each double kernel formed by the union of each pair of single kernels are combined in an equation of a form that is specific to KEM to provide an approximation to the full molecule energy. KEM has been demonstrated to give accurate molecular energies over a wide range of systems, chemical methods and basis sets. The efficiency of KEM makes calculations on large systems tractable. It has been shown to be accurate for calculations on large biomolecules including proteins and DNA. KEM has recently been generalized to provide the one-body density matrix for the full molecule. This generalization greatly expands the utility of the method since the density matrix enables simple calculation of the expectation value of any observable associated with a one-body operator. More importantly, the generalization enables results from KEM to be constrained to satisfy essential quantum mechanical conditions. KEM is generalized to density matrices by taking the density matrices obtained from the single and double kernels and adapting them to the full molecule basis. These augmented kernel density matrices are summed according to the standard KEM expansion. This initial matrix does not necessarily correspond to a valid quantum mechanical N-electron wavefunction which is normalized and obeys the Pauli principle. Such a density matrix is called N-representable. N-representability is imposed on the initial matrix by using the Clinton equations, which deliver a single-determinant N-representable one-body density matrix. Single-determinant N-representability is ensured by enforcing the density matrix to be a normalized projector. Such normalized projectors are factorizable into matrices which deliver full molecule molecular orbitals. Although energies have been demonstrated to be accurate in the original energy expansion form of KEM, there is no requirement that the energy corresponds to the expectation value of a valid quantum mechanical wavefunction. Because of this, there is no requirement that the energies satisfy the variational theorem. Imposing single-determinant N-representability on the KEM density matrix by using the Clinton equations recovers the variational bound on the energy obtained from KEM. Recovery of the variational bound by the N-representable KEM density matrix has been demonstrated by calculations on several water clusters. Energies from full molecule restricted Hartree-Fock calculations were compared to energies obtained from the KEM energy expansion and to energies obtained from the KEM density matrix expansion which had N-representability imposed. In each case where the energy expansion gave energies that violated the variational bound the N-representable density matrix gave energies that satisfied the bound and in fact were more accurate than the simple energy expansion results. The effect of imposing N-representability on the KEM density matrix has also been investigated in the context of Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory (KS/DFT). Calculations on a simple noble gas system and a single water cluster were done. KS/DFT energies were compared to energies from the KEM energy expansion and energies associated with the KEM density matrix expansion on which N-representability was imposed. The energies from the KEM density matrix expansion made N-representable were more accurate than those obtained from straightforward KEM energy expansions in nearly all cases for the noble gas system. For the water cluster the accuracy of the energy obtained from the N-representable KEM density matrix was nearly four times closer to the energy calculated for the full system than the KEM energy expansion result. The Clinton-purified N-representable matrix obtained from the KEM density expansion can be used to calculate expectation values for any one-electron operator. In particular, a KEM density matrix approach can be used in the study of quantum crystallography.
It is well known that determining the energy of molecules and other quantum many-body systems reduces in the standard approximation to optimizing a simple linear functional of a 12-variable object, the two-electron reduced density matrix (2-RDM). The difficulty is that the variation ensemble for that functional has never been satisfactorily determined. This is known as the N-representability problem of quantum chemistry (which to a large extent is a problem of quantum information theory). The situation has given rise to competing research programs, typically trading more complicated functionals for simpler representability conditions. Chief among them is density functional theory, based on a three-variable object for which the N-representability is trivial, whereas the exact functional is very strange indeed, and probably forever unknowable. An intermediate position is occupied by 1-RDM functional theory. Postulated by Pauli to explain the electronic structure of atoms and molecules, the exclusion principle establishes an upper bound of 1 for the fermionic natural occupation numbers, accordingly allowing no more than one electron in each quantum state. This is a necessary and sufficient condition for a 1-RDM to be the contraction of an ensemble N-body density matrix. The fermionic one-body quantum marginal problem asks whether given natural occupation numbers can arise from an antisymmetric (ensemble or pure) N-particle state. The configuration interaction method affords optimal descriptions of quantum states of atoms and molecules by expanding the wave function in terms of orbital-based configurations of Slater determinants. For these systems, the dimension of the Hilbert space grows binomially with m, the number of spin-orbitals in the basis of the one-particle Hilbert space, and N, the number of electrons of the system. It has been observed that for the rank-six approximation of a pure-state N=3 system, the occupation numbers satisfy some additional constraints, stronger than the Pauli exclusion principle. The recent analysis by Alexander Klyachko and coworkers of the one-body marginal problem of the pure N-fermion state establishes a systematic approach to this type of constraints. In fact, for a pure quantum system of N electrons arranged in m spin-orbitals the occupation numbers satisfy a set of linear inequalities, known as generalized Pauli constraints (GPC). These inequalities define a convex polytope of allowed states in R^m. They are conditions for a 1-RDM to be the contraction of a N-body state. When one of the GPC is completely saturated, the system is said to be pinned, and it lies on one of the facets of the polytope. The nature of those conditions has been explored till now only in a few systems: a model of three spinless fermions confined to a one-dimensional harmonic potential, the lithium isoelectronic series and ground and excited states of some three- and four-electron molecules for the rank being at least twice the number of electrons. For all these systems the inequalities are (quite often) nearly saturated. This is the so-called quasipinning phenomenon. In this PhD thesis we have taken up the challenge of using numerical and analytical methods to examine pinned and quasipinned states, for atoms and molecules, starting from scratch with configuration-interaction and multiconfiguration self-consistent methods. This procedure serves to study the occurrence of quasipinning in realistic systems. A second goal is to show how the subsets of pinned states defined by GPC give rise to the most efficient approach from a computational viewpoint, yielding the leading order of the electron-electron correlations. As a consequence, we underline in this thesis the theoretical and practical importance of Klyachko's approach to the quantum marginal problem and its impact on the competing research programs to determine feasible electronic densities, 1-RDM, 2-RDM, intracular distributions or Wigner density quasiprobabilities. In relation with the above, our research provides a new variational optimization method for few-fermion ground states. We quantitatively confirm its high accuracy for quasipinned systems and derive an upper bound on the error of the correlation energy given by the ratio of the numerical value of the Klyachko inequality and the distance to the Hartree-Fock point. Depending on the details of the algorithm, we are able to reach 98%-99% of the correlation energy for such systems.
A density-matrix formulation of the ab initio methods of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is presented. The variational equations for the standard calculational techniques of molecular quantum mechanics are derived from a single expression for the total energy of an N-particle system. A generalization of the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem is proved, showing that the ground-state energy of a many-body Hamiltonian is a functional of the single-particle density matrix and hence of the first-order reduced-density function (the diagonal of which is the particle density of the standard theorem). The theorem is used to develop a new method to calculate the total energy and single-particle properties of the many-body problem.
The latest results of density matrix theory are summarized in terms of analysis of off-diagonal components. For a given reduced density matrix (RDM) of arbitrary order, the full density matrix is explicitly constructed, from which the RDM is derived by means of the corresponding reduction procedure. Both the matrices satisfy all the necessary conditions, such antisymmetry, normalization, hermiticity, except that the non-negative definiteness of the full DM is not guaranteed. If an RDM satisfies the necessary inequalities with the same number of indices as it has itself, then, as proved here, there is an additive correction to the full DM matrix that turns it into a non-negative definite matrix leading to the same RDM and satisfying the other requirements. This establishes a fundamental fact that these inequalities are sufficient as well, providing the N-representability of the given RDM. The construction is based on the classification, introduced in the article, of the multi-index elements of the RDM and full DM according to their degree of off-diagonality. RDM elements with a predetermined degree of off-diagonality are expressed through full DM elements with the same off-diagonality. This shows that the conventional variational approach to calculating the energy of the system by convex programming methods under the conditions of N-representability (before and even after reaching the minimum energy) generally does not lead to constructing a mixed quantum state composed of solutions to the Schrödinger equation. Therefore, except for the energy, it does not guarantee a correct description of the other properties so long as the conditions of correctness for each particular property are not expressed in terms of the RDM and not incorporated into the specific conditions of N-representability (regardless of the requirement of energy minimization).
Density functional theory is currently the most widely applied method in electronic structure theory. The Kohn-Sham method, based on a fictitious system of non-interacting particles, is the work horse of the theory. The particular form of the Kohn-Sham wavefunction admits only idem-potent one electron density matrices whereas wavefunctions of correlated electrons in post-Hartree-Fock methods invariably have fractional occupation numbers. Here we show that by generalizing the orbital concept, and introducing a suitable dot-product as well as a probability density a non-interacting system can be chosen that can represent the one-electron density matrix of any system, even one with fractional occupation numbers. This fictitious system ensures that the exact electron density is accessible within density functional theory. It can also serve as the basis for reduced density matrix functional theory. Moreover, to aid the analysis of the results the orbitals may be assigned energies from a mean-field Hamiltonian. This produces energy levels that are akin to Hartree-Fock orbital energies such that conventional analyses based on Koopmans theorem are available. Finally, this system is convenient in formalisms that depend on creation and annihilation operators as they are trivially applied to single determinant wavefunctions.
With the density-matrix variational method, the ground-state energy of a many-electron system is calculated by minimizing the energy expectation value subject to the selected representability conditions for the second-order reduced-density matrix (2-RDM). There is a lack of size extensivity under the P, Q, and G conditions of this method by applying to M noninteracting atoms and molecules up to M=32; BeM, (CH4)M, and (N2)M. The energy per molecule (E/M) monotonically decreases as M increases, showing the lack of size extensivity in this method. The inextensive contributions to energies are $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ and $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}\text{ }\text{a}\text{.u}\text{.}$ for (CH4)M and (N2)M using the STO-6G basis set, respectively. In the examples studied, E/M approaches a finite value as $M\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$. The intermolecular elements of 2-RDMs do not satisfy the cumulant expansion.