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arXiv:physics/0010066 · Physical Review Letters

Optimization of Ground- and Excited-State Wave Functions and van der Waals Clusters

M. P. Nightingale, V. Melik-Alaverdian

Published Jul 9, 2001• 104 citations
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Abstract

A quantum Monte Carlo method is introduced to optimize excited-state trial wave functions. The method is applied in a correlation function Monte Carlo calculation to compute ground- and excited-state energies of bosonic van der Waals clusters of up to seven particles. The calculations are performed using trial wave functions with general three-body correlations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.87.043401

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A quantum Monte Carlo method is introduced to optimize excited-state trial wave functions. The method is applied in a correlation function Monte Carlo calculation to compute ground- and excited-state energies of bosonic van der Waals clusters of up to seven particles. The calculations are performed using trial wave functions with general three-body correlations.
The computational physics methods of various processes have become very popular during the last several years. Our interest in his field is predominantly motivated by the expectation that it will be possible to perform a detailed comparison between experimental and theoretical results obtained in the study of clusters of a variety of sizes. Algebraic invariants are employed to deal efficiently with the many-body correlations. We study the applicability of the developed trial wave functions over some range of particle masses, from Ar to He and lighter. We compute the ground and excited states energies and various geometric sizes of small clusters as a function of a continuously varied mass parameter. For sufficiently small masses the cluster can no longer support a bound state, and we are interested in particular in the behavior of the clusters in the vicinity of the critical mass, i.e., the point at which the binding energy approaches zero. We show that the use of bosonic polynomials provides enough variational freedom to approximate ground and excited states of clusters of any mass. We discuss how the properties of clusters change with mass.
In calculating energy spectra, unlimited accuracy is only obtained if N-body wavefunctions contain N-body correlations except in special cases. These wave-functions are however not practical both for analytic and computational considerations. To this extent, the possiblity of utilizing correlations less than N is investigated. These investigations are based on the hypothesis whereby in D-dimensions, correlations greater than (D + 1)-body correlations are considerably less important. To accomplish these investigations, we compare the quality Q of the wavefunctions, pertaining to two-, three- and four-body correlations, in various dimensions. The trial wavefunctions used in our Monte Carlo method are linear combinations of elementary basis functions that consist of non-linear variational parameters. This method entails a linear optimization nested in a non-linear one. Once these trial wavefunctions are optimized we employ them as basis functions in a correlation function Monte Carlo which reduces systematically the variational bias of the energy estimates. This method is used to calculate ground and excited state energies of small bosonic van der Waal clusters using wavefunctions with two-, three- and four-body correlations. In calculating energy spectra in different dimensions, it was observed that for N atoms there exists an inter-dimensional degeneracy in the energy spectrum for (N − 1)-dimensions and (N + 1)-dimensions. The finite difference method is also used to calculate 'exact' energy spectra of two-body clusters, and these results are used as a benchmark to compare results obtained by our Monte Carlo method. We also describe a method of obtaining better statistics from quantum Monte Carlo estimators based on the assumption that these estimators are afflicted with distributions that resemble the lognormal probability distribution.
We propose an algorithm for optimizing quantum Monte Carlo wave functions. An improved steepest-descent technique is used, with step size automatically adjustable to obtain a procedure that converges superlinearly. We also propose a novel trial function, which has both correct electron–electron cusp conditions and correct electron–nucleus cusp conditions. To test the optimization procedure and the optimized trial function, the ground states for CH4 and H2O molecules were investigated using variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and fixed-node quantum Monte Carlo (FNQMC) calculations. For CH4 and H2O, the VMC recovered 73.3% and 57.9% of the correlation energy, respectively, and the FNQMC recovered 99.3% and 92.8%, respectively. The optimization procedure is three to five times faster than conventional usual steepest-descent procedures. The trial functions optimized are more accurate than prior trial functions of similar complexity.