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The use of spin-pure and non-orthogonal Hilbert spaces in Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte-Carlo

Simon D. Smart

Published Feb 4, 2014• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte–Carlo (FCIQMC) al- lows for exact results to be obtained for the ground state of a system within a finite-basis approximation of the Schrödinger equation. Work- ing within imposed symmetry constraints permits dramatic reductions in the size and internal connectivity of the Hilbert space considered, with associated reductions in the computational cost involved, as well as permitting exclusion of the natural ground state to extract a se- ries of excited states of the system. As all converged solutions are ˆ eigenfunctions of the square of the total spin operator, S 2 , as well as the Hamiltonian and the projected spin, imposing spin-purity as an additional ‘symmetry’ is a natural extension. In this thesis, the use of various spin-pure spaces is compared to the previously used determinental spaces. Variations on the FCIQMC al- gorithm which work in non-orthogonal (and non-normalised) basis sets, and with the arbitrary discretisation of imaginary time removed, are considered along with the implications of the differences to the normal FCIQMC algorithm.

DOI
10.17863/cam.16295

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Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte–Carlo (FCIQMC) al- lows for exact results to be obtained for the ground state of a system within a finite-basis approximation of the Schrödinger equation. Work- ing within imposed symmetry constraints permits dramatic reductions in the size and internal connectivity of the Hilbert space considered, with associated reductions in the computational cost involved, as well as permitting exclusion of the natural ground state to extract a se- ries of excited states of the system. As all converged solutions are ˆ eigenfunctions of the square of the total spin operator, S 2 , as well as the Hamiltonian and the projected spin, imposing spin-purity as an additional ‘symmetry’ is a natural extension. In this thesis, the use of various spin-pure spaces is compared to the previously used determinental spaces. Variations on the FCIQMC al- gorithm which work in non-orthogonal (and non-normalised) basis sets, and with the arbitrary discretisation of imaginary time removed, are considered along with the implications of the differences to the normal FCIQMC algorithm.
By performing a stochastic dynamic in a space of Slater determinants, the full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) method has been able to obtain energies which are essentially free from systematic error to the basis set correlation energy, within small and systematically improvable error bars. However, the weakly exponential scaling with basis size makes converging the energy with respect to basis set costly and in larger systems, impossible. To ameliorate these basis set issues, here we use perturbation theory to couple the FCIQMC wavefunction to an explicitly correlated strongly orthogonal basis of geminals, following the [2](R12) approach of Valeev et al. The required one- and two-particle density matrices are computed on-the-fly during the FCIQMC dynamic, using a sampling procedure which incurs relatively little additional computation expense. The F12 energy corrections are shown to converge rapidly as a function of sampling, both in imaginary time and number of walkers. Our pilot calculations on the binding curve for the carbon dimer, which exhibits strong correlation effects as well as substantial basis set dependence, demonstrate that the accuracy of the FCIQMC-F12 method surpasses that of all previous FCIQMC calculations, and that the F12 correction improves results equivalent to increasing the quality of the one-electron basis by two cardinal numbers.
Building on the full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) algorithm introduced recently by Booth et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 131, 054106 (2009)] to compute the ground state of correlated many-electron systems, an extension to the computation of excited states (exFCIQMC) is presented. The Hilbert space is divided into a large part consisting of pure Slater determinants and a much smaller orthogonal part (the size of which is controlled by a cut-off threshold), from which the lowest eigenstates can be removed efficiently. In this way, the quantum Monte Carlo algorithm is restricted to the orthogonal complement of the lower excited states and projects out the next highest excited state. Starting from the ground state, higher excited states can be found one after the other. The Schrödinger equation in imaginary time is solved by the same population dynamics as in the ground state algorithm with modified probabilities and matrix elements, for which working formulae are provided. As a proof of principle, the method is applied to lithium hydride in the 3-21G basis set and to the helium dimer in the aug-cc-pVDZ basis set. It is shown to give the correct electronic structure for all bond lengths. Much more testing will be required before the applicability of this method to electron correlation problems of interesting size can be assessed.
We present a new approach to calculate excited states with the full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) method. The approach uses a Gram-Schmidt procedure, instantaneously applied to the stochastically evolving distributions of walkers, to orthogonalize higher energy states against lower energy ones. It can thus be used to study several of the lowest-energy states of a system within the same symmetry. This additional step is particularly simple and computationally inexpensive, requiring only a small change to the underlying FCIQMC algorithm. No trial wave functions or partitioning of the space is needed. The approach should allow excited states to be studied for systems similar to those accessible to the ground-state method due to a comparable computational cost. As a first application, we consider the carbon dimer in basis sets up to quadruple-zeta quality and compare to existing results where available.
We investigate the sign problem for full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC), a stochastic algorithm for finding the ground-state solution of the Schr\"odinger equation with substantially reduced computational cost compared with exact diagonalization. We find kkk-space Hubbard models for which the solution is yielded with storage that grows sublinearly in the size of the many-body Hilbert space, in spite of using a wave function that is simply a linear combination of states. The FCIQMC algorithm is able to find this sublinear scaling regime without bias and with only a choice of the Hamiltonian basis. By means of a demonstration we solve for the energy of a 70-site half-filled system (with a space of 1038{10}^{38}1038 determinants) in 250 core hours, substantially quicker than the $\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{36}$ core hours that would be required by exact diagonalization. This is the largest space that has been sampled in an unbiased fashion. The challenge for the recently developed FCIQMC method is made clear: Expand the sublinear scaling regime while retaining exact-on-average accuracy. We comment upon the relationship between this and the scaling law previously observed in the initiator adaptation (i-FCIQMC). We argue that our results change the landscape for the development of FCIQMC and related methods.
Full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo for accurate ab initio\textit{ab initio}ab initio nuclear structure calculations: algorithms and calculation details
Full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) is a stochastic many-body solver that has been widely applied to electronic, molecular, and condensed-matter systems. In this work we apply FCIQMC to ab initio\textit{ab initio}ab initio nuclear structure calculations using interactions derived from chiral effective field theory. We describe the algorithm in detail, including imaginary-time propagation, excitation generation, estimator choices, the initiator approximation with adaptive shift correction, and reduced-density-matrix (RDM) sampling. Benchmark calculations in small model spaces, where deterministic full configuration interaction (FCI) results are available, validate the stochastic calculation of energies, radii, and RDM-based pure estimators. For large model spaces, we analyze the residual finite-walker bias through systematic walker-number convergence and infinite-walker extrapolations. We also demonstrate that FCIQMC can be extended beyond ground-state calculations by computing the low-lying spectrum of 6^66Li.
The convergence of full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) is accelerated using a quasi-Newton propagation (QN) which can also be applied to coupled cluster Monte Carlo (CCMC). The computational scaling of this optimized propagation is, keeping the additional computational cost to a bare minimum. Its effects are investigated deterministically and stochastically on a model system, the uniform electron gas, with Hilbert space size up to 10 40, and shown to accelerate convergence of the instantaneous projected energy by over an order of magnitude in the FCIQMC test case. Its capabilities are then demonstrated with FCIQMC on an archetypical quantum chemistry problem, the chromium dimer, in an all-electron basis set with Hilbert space size of about 10 22 yielding highly accurate FCI energies.