Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

The Journal of Chemical Physics

Tensor train compression of molecular orbitals

Ruslan A. Mallaev, Dmitry I. Morozov, Dmitry A. Zheltkov, Michael Romanovich Perelshtein, Roman Ellerbrock

Published Oct 13, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This work systematically investigates the tensor train (TT) compressibility of grid-represented Hartree-Fock (HF) and Density Functional Theory (DFT) orbitals across a range of molecular systems and TT formats (standard, quantized, and z-permuted quantized). To overcome limitations of current TT solvers, we employ a novel orthogonal tensor train cross approximation (TT-Cross-Orth) to decompose Hartree-Fock and DFT orbitals into TTs, enabling the study of large molecules. We find that the approximation error decreases exponentially with TT-rank for all systems studied and identify quantized tensor train as the most efficient TT format. Furthermore, we identify quasi-periodic and symmetric structures-including graphene, graphite layers, and polyalanine helices-as particularly favorable candidates exhibiting sublinear rank growth with system size. The tensor train approach automatically compresses quasi-symmetries and systems with symmetry defects, which makes it an attractive approach for materials science applications. TT-Cross-Orth enforces orthogonality during the decomposition, thereby improving stability and reducing the number of function evaluations compared to standard TT-Cross. These findings establish an empirical foundation for the development of scalable tensor network methods for HF and DFT.

DOI
10.1063/5.0327459

Related papers

Fully numerical Hartree-Fock calculations for atoms and small molecules with quantics tensor trains

Paul Haubenwallner, Matthias Heller

Abstract We present a fully numerical framework for the optimization of molecule-specific quantum chemical basis functions within the quantics tensor train format using a finite-difference scheme. The optimization is driven by solving the Hartree–Fock equations (HF) with the density-matrix renormalization group algorithm on Cartesian grids that are iteratively refined. In contrast to the standard way of tackling the mean-field problem by expressing the molecular orbitals as linear combinations of atomic orbitals (LCAO) our method only requires as much basis functions as there are electrons within the system. Benchmark calculations for atoms and molecules with up to ten electrons show excellent agreement with LCAO calculations with large basis sets supporting the validity of the tensor network approach. Our work therefore offers a promising alternative to well-established HF-solvers and could pave the way to define highly accurate, fully numerical, molecule-adaptive basis sets, which, in the future, could lead to benefits for post-HF calculations.

arXiv:2503.08430•Electronic Structure•May 16, 2025•3 citations

A Tensor-product approach for large scale electronic structure calculations using Kohn–Sham density functional theory

Phani Motamarri, Vikram Gavini, Thomas Blesgen

Quantum-mechanical calculations based on Kohn–Sham density functional theory (DFT) played a significant role in accurately predicting various aspects of materials behavior over the past decade. The Kohn–Sham approach to DFT reduces the many-body Schrodinger (eigen value) problem of interacting electrons into an equivalent problem of noninteracting electrons in an effective mean field that is governed by electron-density. Despite the reduced computational complexity of Kohn–Sham DFT, large-scale DFT calculations are still computationally very demanding with the resulting computational complexity scaling cubically with number of atoms in a given materials system. Numerical algorithms with reduced scaling behavior which are robust, computationally efficient and scalable on parallel computing architectures are always desirable to enable simulations at larger scales and on more complex systems. Following this line of thought, this study explores the use of tensor structured methods for ab-initio numerical solution of Kohn–Sham equations arising in DFT calculations. Earlier studies on tensor-structured methods have been quite successful in the accurate calculation of Hartree and the nonlocal exchange operators arising in the Hartree–Fock equations. A recent investigation of low-rank Tucker-type decomposition of the electron-density of large aluminum clusters (obtained from the finite-element discretization of orbital free DFT) shows the exponential decay of approximation error with respect to Tucker rank (number of tensor-basis functions in Tucker type representation). The results also indicate a smaller Tucker rank for the accurate representation of the electron density and is only weakly dependent on the system sizes studied. The promising success of tensor-structured techniques in resolving the electronic structure of material systems has enabled us to take a step further. In this study, we propose a systematic way of computing a globally adapted Tucker-type basis for solving the Kohn–Sham DFT problem by using a separable approximation of the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian. Further, the resulting Kohn–Sham eigenvalue problem is projected into the aforementioned Tucker basis and is solved for ground-state energy using a self-consistent field iteration. The rank of the resulting Tucker representation and the computational complexity of the calculation are examined on representative benchmark examples involving metallic and insulating systems.

•Jan 1, 2014•0 citations

QTT Representation of the Hartree and Exchange Operators in Electronic Structure Calculations

Venera Khoromskaia, Boris N. Khoromskij, Reinhold Schneider

Abstract In this paper, the tensor-structured numerical evaluation of the Coulomb and exchange operators in the Hartree-Fock equation is supplemented by the usage of recent quantized-TT (QTT) formats. It leads to O(log n) complexity at computationally extensive stages in the rank-structured calculation with the respective 3D Hartree and exchange potentials discretized on large n×n×n Cartesian grids. The numerical examples for some volumetric organic molecules confirm that the QTT ranks of these potentials are nearly independent of the one-dimension grid size n. Thus, paradoxically, the complexity of the grid-based evaluation of the Coulumb and exchange matrices becomes almost independent of the grid size, being regulated only by the structure of a molecular system. As a result, the grid approximation of the Hartree-Fock equation allows to gain the high resolution with a guaranteed accuracy.

Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics•Jan 1, 2011•26 citations

Tensor-Structured Techniques for Electronic Structure Calculations

Lin, Ian

Electronic structure calculations have been one of the most successful scientific fields in the past 50 years. Density functional theory (DFT) with its nice balance between accuracy and efficiency has now become the standard technique for many materials research. On the other hand, the size of systems that wavefunction-based methods can handle has also been improved thanks to the recent developments in both computation power and more advanced methodologies. However, these methods are still suffering from the curse of dimensionality. The cubic scaling of a typical DFT calculation restricts the handleable system size of DFT to only a few thousand electrons. To this end, tensor-structured techniques provide a route to constructing a reduced-order algorithm and hence are promising to improve the computational efficiency. In this dissertation work, we aim at exploring the applications of the tensor-structured techniques on different aspects of electronic structure calculations. In the first part of this work, we present a tensor-structured algorithm for efficient large-scale DFT calculations by constructing a Tucker tensor basis that is adapted to the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian and localized in real-space. The proposed approach uses an additive separable approximation to the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian and an L1 localization technique to generate the 1-D localized functions that constitute the Tucker tensor basis. Numerical results show that the resulting Tucker tensor basis exhibits exponential convergence in the ground-state energy with increasing Tucker rank. Further, the proposed tensor-structured algorithm demonstrated sub-quadratic scaling with system-size for both systems with and without a gap, and involving many thousands of atoms. This reduced-order scaling has also resulted in the proposed approach outperforming plane-wave DFT implementation for systems beyond 2000 electrons. In the second part of this work, we present an acceleration scheme for the proposed tensor-structured algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, the discrete Kohn-Sham problem is solved using the Chebyshev filtering subspace iteration method that relies on matrix-matrix multiplications of a sparse symmetric Hamiltonian matrix and a dense wavefunction matrix, expressed in the localized Tucker tensor basis. These matrix-matrix multiplication operations, which constitute the most computationally intensive step of the solution procedure, are GPU accelerated providing ~8-fold GPU-CPU speedup for these operations on the largest systems studied. The computational performance of the GPU accelerated code is presented using benchmark studies on aluminum nano-particles and silicon quantum dots with system sizes ranging up to ~7,000 atoms. Finally, we present a computation kernel using tensor-structured techniques to evaluate the one-electron and two-electron integrals, which are the central quantities to construct the Hamiltonian matrix of a full configuration interaction (FCI) calculation, for any molecular orbitals projected on a tensor-structured finite-element mesh. The proposed computation kernel is used to compute the integrals using Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals, which is subsequently used to perform an FCI calculation. In our numerical study, the FCI energy using integrals from the proposed computation kernel is confirmed to be consistent with a standard FCI calculation using the same Hartree-Fock orbitals. The proposed computation kernel provides a useful tool to investigate the behavior of Kohn-Sham orbitals as a basis for FCI calculations in the future, which could be a route to construct a reduced-order basis for an FCI calculation to reduce the computational cost and enable FCI calculation for the previously computationally inaccessible systems.

•Jan 1, 2022•0 citations

Low-Rank Tensor Approximation in post Hartree-Fock Methods

Udo Benedikt

In this thesis the application of novel tensor decomposition and tensor representation techniques in highly accurate post Hartree-Fock methods is evaluated. These representation techniques can help to overcome the steep scaling behaviour of high level ab-initio calculations with increasing system size and therefore break the "curse of dimensionality". After a comparison of various tensor formats the application of the "canonical polyadic" format (CP) is described in detail. There, especially the casting of a normal, index based tensor into the CP format (tensor decomposition) and a method for a low rank approximation (rank reduction) of the two-electron integrals in the AO basis are investigated. The decisive quantity for the applicability of the CP format is the scaling of the rank with increasing system and basis set size. The memory requirements and the computational effort for tensor manipulations in the CP format are only linear in the number of dimensions but still depend on the expansion length (rank) of the approximation. Furthermore, the AO-MO transformation and a MP2 algorithm with decomposed tensors in the CP format is evaluated and the scaling with increasing system and basis set size is investigated. Finally, a Coupled-Cluster algorithm based only on low-rank CP representation of the MO integrals is developed. There, especially the successive tensor contraction during the iterative solution of the amplitude equations and the error propagation upon multiple application of the reduction procedure are discussed. In conclusion the overall complexity of a Coupled-Cluster procedure with tensors in CP format is evaluated and some possibilities for improvements of the rank reduction procedure tailored to the needs in electronic structure calculations are shown.

•May 15, 2013•2 citations

Compressing multivariate functions with tree tensor networks

Joseph Tindall, Miles Stoudenmire, Ryan Levy

Tensor networks are a compressed format for multi-dimensional data. One dimensional tensor networks—often referred to as tensor trains (TT) or matrix product states (MPS)—are increasingly being used as a numerical Ansatz for continuum functions by ``quantizing’’ the inputs into discrete binary digits. Here we demonstrate the power of more general tree tensor networks (TTNs) for this purpose. We provide direct constructions of a number of elementary functions as generic tree tensor networks and interpolative constructions for more complicated functions via a generalization of the tensor cross interpolation algorithm. For a range of multi-dimensional functions we show how more structured tree tensor networks offer a significantly more efficient Ansatz than the commonly used tensor train. Finally, we demonstrate how the methods introduced in this work can be used to realize a TTN-based solver for multi-dimensional, non-linear Fredholm equations.

arXiv:2410.03572•SciPost Physics•Oct 15, 2026•2 citations
This work systematically investigates the tensor train (TT) compressibility of grid-represented Hartree-Fock (HF) and Density Functional Theory (DFT) orbitals across a range of molecular systems and TT formats (standard, quantized, and z-permuted quantized). To overcome limitations of current TT solvers, we employ a novel orthogonal tensor train cross approximation (TT-Cross-Orth) to decompose Hartree-Fock and DFT orbitals into TTs, enabling the study of large molecules. We find that the approximation error decreases exponentially with TT-rank for all systems studied and identify quantized tensor train as the most efficient TT format. Furthermore, we identify quasi-periodic and symmetric structures-including graphene, graphite layers, and polyalanine helices-as particularly favorable candidates exhibiting sublinear rank growth with system size. The tensor train approach automatically compresses quasi-symmetries and systems with symmetry defects, which makes it an attractive approach for materials science applications. TT-Cross-Orth enforces orthogonality during the decomposition, thereby improving stability and reducing the number of function evaluations compared to standard TT-Cross. These findings establish an empirical foundation for the development of scalable tensor network methods for HF and DFT.
Abstract We present a fully numerical framework for the optimization of molecule-specific quantum chemical basis functions within the quantics tensor train format using a finite-difference scheme. The optimization is driven by solving the Hartree–Fock equations (HF) with the density-matrix renormalization group algorithm on Cartesian grids that are iteratively refined. In contrast to the standard way of tackling the mean-field problem by expressing the molecular orbitals as linear combinations of atomic orbitals (LCAO) our method only requires as much basis functions as there are electrons within the system. Benchmark calculations for atoms and molecules with up to ten electrons show excellent agreement with LCAO calculations with large basis sets supporting the validity of the tensor network approach. Our work therefore offers a promising alternative to well-established HF-solvers and could pave the way to define highly accurate, fully numerical, molecule-adaptive basis sets, which, in the future, could lead to benefits for post-HF calculations.
Quantum-mechanical calculations based on Kohn–Sham density functional theory (DFT) played a significant role in accurately predicting various aspects of materials behavior over the past decade. The Kohn–Sham approach to DFT reduces the many-body Schrodinger (eigen value) problem of interacting electrons into an equivalent problem of noninteracting electrons in an effective mean field that is governed by electron-density. Despite the reduced computational complexity of Kohn–Sham DFT, large-scale DFT calculations are still computationally very demanding with the resulting computational complexity scaling cubically with number of atoms in a given materials system. Numerical algorithms with reduced scaling behavior which are robust, computationally efficient and scalable on parallel computing architectures are always desirable to enable simulations at larger scales and on more complex systems. Following this line of thought, this study explores the use of tensor structured methods for ab-initio numerical solution of Kohn–Sham equations arising in DFT calculations. Earlier studies on tensor-structured methods have been quite successful in the accurate calculation of Hartree and the nonlocal exchange operators arising in the Hartree–Fock equations. A recent investigation of low-rank Tucker-type decomposition of the electron-density of large aluminum clusters (obtained from the finite-element discretization of orbital free DFT) shows the exponential decay of approximation error with respect to Tucker rank (number of tensor-basis functions in Tucker type representation). The results also indicate a smaller Tucker rank for the accurate representation of the electron density and is only weakly dependent on the system sizes studied. The promising success of tensor-structured techniques in resolving the electronic structure of material systems has enabled us to take a step further. In this study, we propose a systematic way of computing a globally adapted Tucker-type basis for solving the Kohn–Sham DFT problem by using a separable approximation of the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian. Further, the resulting Kohn–Sham eigenvalue problem is projected into the aforementioned Tucker basis and is solved for ground-state energy using a self-consistent field iteration. The rank of the resulting Tucker representation and the computational complexity of the calculation are examined on representative benchmark examples involving metallic and insulating systems.
Abstract In this paper, the tensor-structured numerical evaluation of the Coulomb and exchange operators in the Hartree-Fock equation is supplemented by the usage of recent quantized-TT (QTT) formats. It leads to O(log n) complexity at computationally extensive stages in the rank-structured calculation with the respective 3D Hartree and exchange potentials discretized on large n×n×n Cartesian grids. The numerical examples for some volumetric organic molecules confirm that the QTT ranks of these potentials are nearly independent of the one-dimension grid size n. Thus, paradoxically, the complexity of the grid-based evaluation of the Coulumb and exchange matrices becomes almost independent of the grid size, being regulated only by the structure of a molecular system. As a result, the grid approximation of the Hartree-Fock equation allows to gain the high resolution with a guaranteed accuracy.
Electronic structure calculations have been one of the most successful scientific fields in the past 50 years. Density functional theory (DFT) with its nice balance between accuracy and efficiency has now become the standard technique for many materials research. On the other hand, the size of systems that wavefunction-based methods can handle has also been improved thanks to the recent developments in both computation power and more advanced methodologies. However, these methods are still suffering from the curse of dimensionality. The cubic scaling of a typical DFT calculation restricts the handleable system size of DFT to only a few thousand electrons. To this end, tensor-structured techniques provide a route to constructing a reduced-order algorithm and hence are promising to improve the computational efficiency. In this dissertation work, we aim at exploring the applications of the tensor-structured techniques on different aspects of electronic structure calculations. In the first part of this work, we present a tensor-structured algorithm for efficient large-scale DFT calculations by constructing a Tucker tensor basis that is adapted to the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian and localized in real-space. The proposed approach uses an additive separable approximation to the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian and an L1 localization technique to generate the 1-D localized functions that constitute the Tucker tensor basis. Numerical results show that the resulting Tucker tensor basis exhibits exponential convergence in the ground-state energy with increasing Tucker rank. Further, the proposed tensor-structured algorithm demonstrated sub-quadratic scaling with system-size for both systems with and without a gap, and involving many thousands of atoms. This reduced-order scaling has also resulted in the proposed approach outperforming plane-wave DFT implementation for systems beyond 2000 electrons. In the second part of this work, we present an acceleration scheme for the proposed tensor-structured algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, the discrete Kohn-Sham problem is solved using the Chebyshev filtering subspace iteration method that relies on matrix-matrix multiplications of a sparse symmetric Hamiltonian matrix and a dense wavefunction matrix, expressed in the localized Tucker tensor basis. These matrix-matrix multiplication operations, which constitute the most computationally intensive step of the solution procedure, are GPU accelerated providing ~8-fold GPU-CPU speedup for these operations on the largest systems studied. The computational performance of the GPU accelerated code is presented using benchmark studies on aluminum nano-particles and silicon quantum dots with system sizes ranging up to ~7,000 atoms. Finally, we present a computation kernel using tensor-structured techniques to evaluate the one-electron and two-electron integrals, which are the central quantities to construct the Hamiltonian matrix of a full configuration interaction (FCI) calculation, for any molecular orbitals projected on a tensor-structured finite-element mesh. The proposed computation kernel is used to compute the integrals using Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals, which is subsequently used to perform an FCI calculation. In our numerical study, the FCI energy using integrals from the proposed computation kernel is confirmed to be consistent with a standard FCI calculation using the same Hartree-Fock orbitals. The proposed computation kernel provides a useful tool to investigate the behavior of Kohn-Sham orbitals as a basis for FCI calculations in the future, which could be a route to construct a reduced-order basis for an FCI calculation to reduce the computational cost and enable FCI calculation for the previously computationally inaccessible systems.
In this thesis the application of novel tensor decomposition and tensor representation techniques in highly accurate post Hartree-Fock methods is evaluated. These representation techniques can help to overcome the steep scaling behaviour of high level ab-initio calculations with increasing system size and therefore break the "curse of dimensionality". After a comparison of various tensor formats the application of the "canonical polyadic" format (CP) is described in detail. There, especially the casting of a normal, index based tensor into the CP format (tensor decomposition) and a method for a low rank approximation (rank reduction) of the two-electron integrals in the AO basis are investigated. The decisive quantity for the applicability of the CP format is the scaling of the rank with increasing system and basis set size. The memory requirements and the computational effort for tensor manipulations in the CP format are only linear in the number of dimensions but still depend on the expansion length (rank) of the approximation. Furthermore, the AO-MO transformation and a MP2 algorithm with decomposed tensors in the CP format is evaluated and the scaling with increasing system and basis set size is investigated. Finally, a Coupled-Cluster algorithm based only on low-rank CP representation of the MO integrals is developed. There, especially the successive tensor contraction during the iterative solution of the amplitude equations and the error propagation upon multiple application of the reduction procedure are discussed. In conclusion the overall complexity of a Coupled-Cluster procedure with tensors in CP format is evaluated and some possibilities for improvements of the rank reduction procedure tailored to the needs in electronic structure calculations are shown.
Tensor networks are a compressed format for multi-dimensional data. One dimensional tensor networks—often referred to as tensor trains (TT) or matrix product states (MPS)—are increasingly being used as a numerical Ansatz for continuum functions by ``quantizing’’ the inputs into discrete binary digits. Here we demonstrate the power of more general tree tensor networks (TTNs) for this purpose. We provide direct constructions of a number of elementary functions as generic tree tensor networks and interpolative constructions for more complicated functions via a generalization of the tensor cross interpolation algorithm. For a range of multi-dimensional functions we show how more structured tree tensor networks offer a significantly more efficient Ansatz than the commonly used tensor train. Finally, we demonstrate how the methods introduced in this work can be used to realize a TTN-based solver for multi-dimensional, non-linear Fredholm equations.