We present efficient algorithms for using selected configuration interaction (sCI) trial wave functions in phaseless auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC). These advancements, geared towards optimizing computational performance for longer CI expansions, allow us to use up to a million configurations feasibly in the trial state for ph-AFQMC. In one example, we found the cost of ph-AFQMC per sample to increase only by a factor of about $3$ for a calculation with $10^4$ configurations compared to that with a single one, demonstrating the tiny computational overhead due to a longer expansion. This favorable scaling allows us to study the systematic convergence of the phaseless bias in AFQMC calculations with an increasing number of configurations and provides a means to gauge the accuracy of ph-AFQMC with other trial states. We also show how the scalability issues of sCI trial states for large system sizes could be mitigated by restricting them to a moderately sized orbital active space and leveraging the near-cancellation of out of active space phaseless errors.
We investigate the viability of the phaseless finite temperature auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-FT-AFQMC) method for ab initio systems using the uniform electron gas as a model. Through comparisons with exact results and finite temperature coupled cluster theory, we find that ph-FT-AFQMC is sufficiently accurate at high to intermediate electronic densities. We show both analytically and numerically that the phaseless constraint at finite temperature is fundamentally different from its zero temperature counterpart (i.e., ph-ZT-AFQMC) and generally one should not expect ph-FT-AFQMC to a…
We show that the recently developed phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) method can be used to study excited states, providing an alternative to standard quantum chemistry methods. The phaseless AFQMC approach, whose computational cost scales as M^3-M^4 with system size M, has been shown to be among the most accurate many-body methods in ground state calculations. For excited states, prevention of collapse into the ground state and control of the Fermion sign/phase problem are accomplished by the approximate phaseless constraint with a trial wave function. Using the challengin…
The ground state electronic energy of benzene is the focus of a recent blind test by Eriksen and co-workers [arXiv:2008.02678]. In this note, we report the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) results on the identical problem. We examine trial wavefunctions of the spin-restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF), and complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF) with an active space of 6-electron and 6-orbital (i.e., CAS(6,6)) form for the cc-pVDZ basis set. ph-AFQMC+RHF deviates from the value where many methods agreed on (i.e., -863 m$E_h$) by -3.1(3) m$E_h$ whereas ph-AFQMC+CAS…
We present phaseless auxiliary-field (AF) quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations of the ground states of some hydrogen-bonded systems. These systems were selected to test and benchmark different aspects of the new phaseless AF QMC method. They include the transition state of H+H$_2$ near the equilibrium geometry and in the van der Walls limit, as well as H$_2$O, OH, and H$_2$O$_2$ molecules. Most of these systems present significant challenges for traditional independent-particle electronic structure approaches, and many also have exact results available. The phaseless AF QMC method is used ei…
Bond stretching mimics different levels of electron correlation and provides a challenging testbed for approximate many-body computational methods. Using the recently developed phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AF QMC) method, we examine bond stretching in the well-studied molecules BH and N$_2$, and in the H$_{50}$ chain. To control the sign/phase problem, the phaseless AF QMC method constrains the paths in the auxiliary-field path integrals with an approximate phase condition that depends on a trial wave function. With single Slater determinants from unrestricted Hartree-Fock (U…
We present an \textit{ab initio} auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo method for studying the electronic structure of molecules, solids, and model Hamiltonians at finite temperature. The algorithm marries the \textit{ab initio} phaseless auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo algorithm known to produce high accuracy ground state energies of molecules and solids with its finite temperature variant, long used by condensed matter physicists for studying model Hamiltonian phase diagrams, to yield a phaseless, \textit{ab initio} finite temperature method. We demonstrate that the method produces interna…
We extend the recently introduced phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) approach to any single-particle basis, and apply it to molecular systems with Gaussian basis sets. QMC methods in general scale favorably with system size, as a low power. A QMC approach with auxiliary fields in principle allows an exact solution of the Schrodinger equation in the chosen basis. However, the well-known sign/phase problem causes the statistical noise to increase exponentially. The phaseless method controls this problem by constraining the paths in the auxiliary-field path integrals with an appr…
A series of calculations for the first- and second-row post-d elements (Ga-Br and In-I) are presented using the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AF QMC) method. This method is formulated in a Hilbert space defined by any chosen one-particle basis, and maps the many-body problem into a linear combination of independent-particle solutions with external auxiliary fields. The phase/sign problem is handled approximately by the phaseless formalism using a trial wave function, which in our calculations was chosen to be the Hartree-Fock solution. We used the consistent correlated basis s…
Nuclear gradients from auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo and their application in geometry optimization and transition state search
University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Marcus Center for Theoretical Chemistry（马库斯理论化学中心）
The chromium dimer (Cr2) presents an outstanding challenge for many-body electronic structure methods. Its complicated nature of binding, with a formal sextuple bond and an unusual potential energy curve, is emblematic of the competing tendencies and delicate balance found in many strongly correlated materials. We present a near-exact calculation of the potential energy curve (PEC) and ground state properties of Cr2, using the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) method. Unconstrained, exact AFQMC calculations are first carried out for a medium-sized but realistic basis set. Elimination…
Phaseless Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) has recently emerged as a promising method for the production of benchmark-level simulations of medium to large-sized molecules, due to its accuracy and favorable polynomial scaling with system size. Unfortunately the memory footprint of standard energy evaluation algorithms are non-trivial, which can significantly impact timings on graphical processing units (GPUs) where memory is limited. Previous attempts to reduce scaling by taking advantage of the low rank structure of the Coulombic integrals have been successful, but are significan…
Chemical accuracy is difficult to achieve for systems with transition metal atoms. Third row transition metal atoms are particularly challenging due to strong electron-electron correlation in localized d-orbitals. The Cr2 molecule is an outstanding example, which we previously treated with highly accurate auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) calculations [Purwanto et al., J. Chem. Phys. 142, 064302 (2015)]. Somewhat surprisingly, computational description of the isoelectronic Mo2 dimer has also, to date, been scattered and less than satisfactory. We present high-level theoretical benchm…
The energy gap between the lowest-lying singlet and triplet states is an important quantity in chemical photocatalysis, with relevant applications ranging from triplet fusion in optical upconversion to the design of organic light-emitting devices. The ab initio prediction of singlet-triplet (ST) gaps is challenging due to the potentially biradical nature of the involved states, combined with the potentially large size of relevant molecules. In this work, we show that phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) can accurately predict ST gaps for chemical systems with singlet states…
We explore the extended Koopmans' theorem (EKT) within the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) method. The EKT allows for the direct calculation of electron addition and removal spectral functions using reduced density matrices of the $N$-particle system, and avoids the need for analytic continuation. The lowest level of EKT with AFQMC, called EKT1-AFQMC, is benchmarked using small molecules, 14-electron and 54-electron uniform electron gas supercells, and diamond at the $Γ$-point. Via comparison with numerically exact results (when possible) and coupled-cluster methods, we f…
We assess the utility of Hartree-Fock (HF) trial wavefunctions in performing phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) on the uniform electron gas (UEG) model. The combination of ph-AFQMC with spin-restricted HF (RHF+ph-AFQMC), was found to be highly accurate and efficient for systems containing up to 114 electrons in 2109 orbitals, particularly for $r_s$ $\le$ 2.0. Compared to spin-restricted coupled-cluster (RCC) methods, we found that RHF+ph-AFQMC performs better than CC with singles, doubles, and triples (RCCSDT) and similarly to or slightly worse than CC with singles, doubl…
The bond dissociation energies of a set of 44 3d transition metal-containing diatomics are computed with phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) utilizing a correlated sampling technique. We investigate molecules with H, N, O, F, Cl, and S ligands, including those in the 3dMLBE20 database first compiled by Truhlar and co-workers with calculated and experimental values that have since been revised by various groups. In order to make a direct comparison of the accuracy of our ph-AFQMC calculations with previously published results from 10 DFT functionals, CCSD(T), and icMR-CCSD(…
The exact and phaseless variants of Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) have been shown to be capable of producing accurate ground-state energies for a wide variety of systems including those which exhibit substantial electron correlation effects. The computational cost of performing these calculations has to date been relatively high, impeding many important applications of these approaches. Here we present a correlated sampling methodology for AFQMC which relies on error cancellation to dramatically accelerate the calculation of energy differences of relevance to chemical transformat…
We present three distinct examples where phaseless auxiliary-field Quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) can be reliably performed with a single-determinant trial wavefunction with essential symmetry breaking. We first utilized essential time-reversal symmetry breaking with ph-AFQMC to compute the triplet-singlet energy gap in the TS12 set. We found statistically better performance of ph-AFQMC with complex-restricted orbitals than with spin-unrestricted orbitals. We then showed the utilization of essential spin symmetry breaking when computing the single-triplet gap of a known biradicaloid, C$_{36}$.…
In this work, we present an overview of the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph- AFQMC) approach from a computational quantum chemistry perspective, and present a numerical assessment of its performance on main group chemistry and bond-breaking problems with a total of 1004 relative energies. While our benchmark study is somewhat limited, we make recommendations for the use of ph-AFQMC for general main-group chemistry applications. For systems where single determinant wave functions are qualitatively accurate, we expect the accuracy of ph-AFQMC in conjunction with a single determ…
Transition metal complexes are ubiquitous in biology and chemical catalysis, yet they remain difficult to accurately describe with ab initio methods due to the presence of a large degree of dynamic electron correlation, and, in some cases, strong static correlation which results from a manifold of low-lying states. Progress has been hindered by a scarcity of high quality gas-phase experimental data, while exact ab initio predictions are usually computationally unaffordable due to the large size of the systems. In this work, we present a data set of 34 3d metal-containing complexes with gas-pha…
We explore the use of the stochastic resolution-of-the-identity (sRI) with the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) method. sRI is combined with four existing local energy evaluation strategies in ph-AFQMC, namely (1) the half-rotated electron repulsion integral tensor (HR), (2) Cholesky decomposition (CD), (3) tensor hypercontraction (THC), or (4) low-rank factorization (LR). We demonstrate that HR-sRI achieves no scaling reduction, CD-sRI scales as $\mathcal O(N^3)$, and THC-sRI and LR-sRI scale as $\mathcal O(N^2)$, albeit with a potentially large prefactor. Furthermore,…
Doubling the size of quantum selected configuration interaction based on seniority-zero space and its application to QC-QSCI-AFQMC
Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, The University of Osaka（大阪大学量子信息与量子生物学中心）；Technology Strategy Center, TOPPAN Digital Inc.（凸版数字有限公司技术战略中心）；Technical Research Institute, TOPPAN Holdings Inc.（凸版控股株式会社技术研究所）
We explore different ways of incorporating accurate trial wave functions into free projection auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo (fp-AFQMC). Trial states employed include coupled cluster singles and doubles, multi-Slater, and symmetry projected mean-field wave functions. We adapt a recently proposed fast multi-Slater local energy evaluation algorithm for fp-AFQMC, making the use of long expansions from selected configuration interaction methods feasible. We demonstrate how these trial wave functions serve to mitigate the sign problem and accelerate convergence in quantum chemical problems, al…
We report the development of a python-based auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) program, ipie, with preliminary timing benchmarks and new AFQMC results on the isomerization of [Cu$_2$O$_2$$]^{2+}$. We demonstrate how implementations for both central and graphical processing units (CPUs and GPUs) are achieved in ipie. We show an interface of ipie with PySCF as well as a straightforward template for adding new estimators to ipie. Our timing benchmarks against other C++ codes, QMCPACK and Dice, suggest that ipie is faster or similarly performing for all chemical systems considered on both…
Recent developments in selected configuration interaction methods have led to increased interest in using multi-Slater trial wave functions in various quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. Here we present an algorithm for calculating the local energy of a multi-Slater wave function in orbital space QMC. For an ab initio Hamiltonian, our algorithm has a cost scaling of $O(n^5 + n_c)$, as opposed to the $O(n^4n_c)$ scaling of existing orbital space algorithms, where $n$ is the system size, and $n_c$ is the number of configurations in the wave function. We present our method using variational Monte …
