We present an advanced
ab initio quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculation of the ground state of undoped CaCuO
2. We extend the traditional single-determinant Slater-Jastrow approach to include multi-determinant wave functions, inhomogeneous Jastrow factors, and orbital optimization. Our results demonstrate not only an improvement in the variational bound of the ground state energy -- 2.3 eV per formula unit lower than previous state of the art techniques -- but also confirm the presence of spin fluctuations in multi-determinant wave functions in a strongly correlated cuprate system, which is integral to understanding high-
Tc superconductivity. This is the first demonstration of capturing spin fluctuations in QMC wave functions on a cuprate, establishing the groundwork for new studies on doped cuprates in the superconducting state, where spin fluctuations require more accurate characterization.
Multideterminant wavefunctions, while having a long history in quantum chemistry, are increasingly being used in highly accurate quantum Monte Carlo calculations. Since the accuracy of QMC is ultimately limited by the quality of the trial wavefunction, multi-Slater determinants wavefunctions offer an attractive alternative to Slater-Jastrow and more sophisticated wavefunction ansatz for several reasons. They can be efficiently calculated, straightforwardly optimized, and systematically improved by increasing the number of included determinants. In spite of their potential, however, the convergence properties of multi-Slater determinant wavefunctions with respect to orbital set choice and excited determinant selection are poorly understood, which hinders the application of these wavefunctions to large systems and solids. In this paper, by performing QMC calculations on the equilibrium and stretched carbon dimer, we find that convergence of the recovered correlation energy with respect to number of determinants can depend quite strongly on basis set and determinant selection methods, especially where there is strong correlation. We demonstrate that properly chosen orbital sets and determinant selection techniques from quantum chemistry methods can dramatically reduce the required number of determinants (and thus the computational cost) to reach a given accuracy, which we argue shows clear need for an automatic QMC-only method for selecting determinants and generating optimal orbital sets.
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 (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.
We investigate the ground-state properties of two strongly-correlated systems: the two-dimensional
t−J model that can be used to study the high-temperature superconducting phase in the doped antiferromagnet, and the frustrated N\'eel antiferromagnet described by the
J1−J2 Heisenberg model on the square lattice, which is widely considered as the prototype model for spin frustration. In this thesis, we apply to these two systems state-of-the-art quantum Monte Carlo techniques, including the variational and the Green's function Monte Carlo with the fixed-node approximation. Few Lanczos steps are used to systematically improve the accuracy of the trial wave functions. By introducing a suitable regularization scheme for the variational calculations with few Lanczos steps, stable and controllable simulations can be performed up to very large cluster sizes with very good accuracy. In the two-dimensional
t−J model at
J/t=0.4, we show that the accuracy of the Gutzwiller-projected variational state (containing
dx2−y2 pairing) can be improved much by few Lanczos steps; in addition, the fixed-node Monte Carlo with these systematically improvable trial wave functions gives results that are comparable with the best accurate DMRG ones. Our main outcome is that the ground state is homogeneous and no evidence of stripes is detected around the doping
δ=1/8. Indeed, our best approximation to the ground state does not show any tendency towards charge inhomogeneity. Furthermore, our results show that a uniform state containing superconductivity and antiferromagnetism is stabilized at low hole doping, i.e.,
δ≲0.1. In the
J1−J2 Heisenberg model on the square lattice, we use the projected mean-field state that is built from Abrikosov fermions having a
Z2 gauge structure and four Dirac points in the spinon spectrum. No spin or dimer order is found in the strongly frustrated regime and our calculations imply that a spin liquid phase may faithfully represent the exact ground state around
J2/J1=0.5. The few Lanczos step technique is used to systematically improve the accuracy of the variational states both for the ground state and for few relevant low-energy excitations. This procedure allows us to estimate, in a valuable and systemic way, the spin gaps within thermodynamical limit and to show a solid evidence of an unconventional gapless excitation spectrum in the strongly frustrated regime, i.e.,
J2/J1≃0.5. In particular, we found gapless triplet excitations at momenta
(π,0) and
(0,π), which are compatible with the presence of four Dirac points at momenta
(±2π,±2π) in the spinon spectrum.
A scheme of optimization of a trial wave function in the variational Monte Carlo calculation is developed. It provides a more precise description of the ground state for strongly correlated electronic systems with highly improved trial wave function. A general type of variational wave function constructed from a linear combination of Slater determinants multiplied by Jastrow correlation factors is proposed. They can explicitly contain low-energy fluctuations and long-range correlations. Using this optimization method, we examine the properties of these wave functions by applying them to a one-dimensional Hubbard model for which the exact solution is available for comparison. It is found that these wave functions prove to be substantial improvements compared to the conventional Jastrow-type wave functions.