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Excited States in Variational Many-Body Approaches

David Gustafsson

Published Jan 1, 2018• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

A method is implemented wherein numerical approximations to the ground and first few excited states of a quantum mechanical N -body 1D harmonic oscillator are found through variational methods, representing the states as a linear combination of normalized pseudo-states which are themselves linear combinations of non-orthogonal Slater determinants. These states are then used as a low energy basis for configuration interaction. An expression is derived for an analytical matrix derivative of the energy functional, in order to improve the speed of the variation. The speed and accuracy using the analytical derivative is compared to that of the numerical derivative, and a number of different gradient descent methods are tried and compared.

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A method is implemented wherein numerical approximations to the ground and first few excited states of a quantum mechanical N -body 1D harmonic oscillator are found through variational methods, representing the states as a linear combination of normalized pseudo-states which are themselves linear combinations of non-orthogonal Slater determinants. These states are then used as a low energy basis for configuration interaction. An expression is derived for an analytical matrix derivative of the energy functional, in order to improve the speed of the variation. The speed and accuracy using the analytical derivative is compared to that of the numerical derivative, and a number of different gradient descent methods are tried and compared.
In this thesis a method for doing approximate calculations of the ground state of quantum mechanical many-body systems is developed and implemented. This method uses the Hartree-Fock method as a starting point and approximates the ground state as a linear combination of non-orthogonal Slater determinants. The Slater determinants are added consecutively by minimising their associated energy while keeping the previously found Slater determinants fixed. This method was tested on a quantum harmonic oscillator filled with interacting fermions and was found to give good approximations to the ground state of this system with only a few Slater determinants. Error estimation of the approximated ground state is done by calculating the energy variance. The energy variance was used in two different methods for improving upon the approximated energy, both of which was found to work well.
We propose a simple, easy to implement, variant of the EXCITED method for variational many-body calculations for excited states. We apply this method to the Hybrid Multideterminant method(HMD). We test this method with relatively few Slater determinants by comparing the results with exact shell model calculations for 56Ni{}^{56}Ni56Ni using the fpd6fpd6fpd6 interaction. We obtain very good agreement with the exact results.
Variational calculations play an important role in quantum mechanics, particularly in determining the ground-state energy of physical systems. Didactic examples in which one can see how the exact energy and wave function are approached by using a family of trial functions are not very numerous. An example was given in a recent book [M. Moshinsky, The Harmonic Oscillator in Modern Physics: From Atoms to Quarks (Gordon and Breach, New York, 1969)] which discusses the ground state of the hydrogen atom using as trial wave function a linear combination of harmonic-oscillator states. In the present paper we carry out a similar analysis for the ground state of a particle of mass m in a three-dimensional square-well potential. We discuss not only the approach to the exact energy when we vary the frequency and the number of oscillator states but also analyze the overlap of the exact and variational wave functions and compare the exact and approximate form factors.
Slater determinants have underpinned quantum chemistry for nearly a century, yet their full potential has remained challenging to exploit. In this work, we show that a variational wavefunction composed of a few hundred optimized non-orthogonal determinants can achieve energy accuracies comparable to the state of the art. This is obtained by introducing an optimization method that leverages the quadratic dependence of the variational energy on the orbitals of each determinant, enabling an exact iterative optimization, and uses an efficient tensor-contraction algorithm to evaluate the effective Hamiltonian with a computational cost that scales as the fourth power of the number of basis functions. We benchmark the accuracy of the proposed method with exact full-configuration interaction results where available, and we achieve lower variational energies than coupled cluster (CCSD(T)) for several molecules in the double-zeta basis. Accurate description of electronic wave functions typically requires large numbers of Slater determinants. Here, the authors develop an optimization method that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for small molecules with only few hundred determinants.
Accurate electronic excited states are essential for photochemistry, spectroscopy and non-adiabatic molecular dynamics, but high-level calculations often scale steeply and require prior knowledge of the target state's character or symmetry. Here we show that variational excited-state optimization can be reformulated as an iterated ground-state-like problem for a low-energy subspace of the electronic Hamiltonian. Applying this variational principle to non-orthogonal Slater determinants leads to EXIDOS, an automatic method for excited state calculations controlled only by the number of states and determinants per state. EXIDOS optimizes multiple excited states simultaneously, without explicit orthogonality constraints or imposed spin and point-group symmetries. Benchmarks against FCI and state-of-the-art quantum chemistry methods show chemical accuracy for a multitude of states in N2_22​ and CO, charge-transfer states in HCl, Rydberg states in NH3_33​, double excitations and extended potential-energy curves in C2_22​, and avoided crossings and conical intersections in ethylene. These results establish EXIDOS as a low-scaling, fully variational route to chemically accurate excited states.
Abstract Quantum few-body systems are deceptively simple. Indeed, with the notable exception of a few special cases, their associated Schrödinger equation cannot be solved analytically for more than two particles. One has to resort to approximation methods to tackle quantum few-body problems. In particular, variational methods have been proposed to ease numerical calculations and obtain precise solutions. One such method is the Stochastic Variational Method, which employs a stochastic search to determine the number and parameters of correlated Gaussian basis functions used to construct an ansatz of the wave function. Stochastic methods, however, face numerical and optimization challenges as the number of particles increases. We introduce a family of gradient variational methods that replace stochastic search with gradient optimization. We comparatively and empirically evaluate the performance of the baseline Stochastic Variational Method, several instances of the gradient variational method family, and some hybrid methods for selected few-body problems. We show that gradient and hybrid methods can be more efficient and effective than the Stochastic Variational Method. We discuss the role of singularities, oscillations, and gradient optimization strategies in the performance of the respective methods.