An efficient implementation of Slater-Condon rules

Slater-Condon rules are at the heart of any quantum chemistry method as they allow to simplify $3N$-dimensional integrals as sums of 3- or 6-dimensional integrals. In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of those rules in order to identify very rapidly which integrals are involved in a matrix element expressed in the determinant basis set. This implementation takes advantage of the bit manipulation instructions on x86 architectures that were introduced in 2008 with the SSE4.2 instruction set. Finding which spin-orbitals are involved in the calculation of a matrix element doesn't depend on the number of electrons of the system.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Fixed-Node Diffusion Monte Carlo potential energy curve of the fluorine molecule F2 using selected configuration interaction trial wavefunctions

The potential energy curve of the F$_2$ molecule is calculated with Fixed-Node Diffusion Monte Carlo (FN-DMC) using Configuration Interaction (CI)-type trial wavefunctions. To keep the number of determinants reasonable (the first and second derivatives of the trial wavefunction need to be calculated at each step of FN-DMC), the CI expansion is restricted to those determinants that contribute the most to the total energy. The selection of the determinants is made using the so-called CIPSI approach (Configuration Interaction using a Perturbative Selection made Iteratively). Quite remarkably, the nodes of CIPSI wavefunctions are found to be systematically improved when increasing the number of selected determinants. To reduce the non-parallelism error of the potential energy curve a scheme based on the use of a $R$-dependent number of determinants is introduced. Numerical results show that improved FN-DMC energy curves for the F$_2$ molecule are obtained when employing CIPSI trial wavefunctions. Using the Dunning's cc-pVDZ basis set the FN-DMC energy curve is of a quality similar to that obtained with FCI/cc-pVQZ. A key advantage of using selected CI in FN-DMC is the possibility of improving nodes in a systematic and automatic way without resorting to a preliminary multi-parameter stochastic optimization of the trial wavefunction performed at the Variational Monte Carlo level as usually done in FN-DMC.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure

Quantum Monte Carlo with very large multideterminant wavefunctions

An algorithm to compute efficiently the first two derivatives of (very) large multideterminant wavefunctions for quantum Monte Carlo calculations is presented. The calculation of determinants and their derivatives is performed using the Sherman-Morrison formula for updating the inverse Slater matrix. An improved implementation based on the reduction of the number of column substitutions and on a very efficient implementation of the calculation of the scalar products involved is presented. It is emphasized that multideterminant expansions contain in general a large number of identical spin-specific determinants: for typical configuration interaction-type wavefunctions the number of unique spin-specific determinants $N_{\rm det}^\sigma$ ($\sigma=\uparrow,\downarrow$) with a non-negligible weight in the expansion is of order ${\cal O}(\sqrt{N_{\rm det}})$. We show that a careful implementation of the calculation of the $N_{\rm det}$-dependent contributions can make this step negligible enough so that in practice the algorithm scales as the total number of unique spin-specific determinants, $\; N_{\rm det}^\uparrow + N_{\rm det}^\downarrow$, over a wide range of total number of determinants (here, $N_{\rm det}$ up to about one million), thus greatly reducing the total computational cost. Finally, a new truncation scheme for the multideterminant expansion is proposed so that larger expansions can be considered without increasing the computational time. The algorithm is illustrated with all-electron Fixed-Node Diffusion Monte Carlo calculations of the total energy of the chlorine atom. Calculations using a trial wavefunction including about 750 000 determinants with a computational increase of $\sim$ 400 compared to a single-determinant calculation are shown to be feasible.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Spin density distribution in open-shell transition metal systems: A comparative post-Hartree-Fock, Density Functional Theory and quantum Monte Carlo study of the CuCl2 molecule

We present a comparative study of the spatial distribution of the spin density (SD) of the ground state of CuCl2 using Density Functional Theory (DFT), quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), and post-Hartree-Fock wavefunction theory (WFT). A number of studies have shown that an accurate description of the electronic structure of the lowest-lying states of this molecule is particularly challenging due to the interplay between the strong dynamical correlation effects in the 3d shell of the copper atom and the delocalization of the 3d hole over the chlorine atoms. It is shown here that qualitatively different results for SD are obtained from these various quantum-chemical approaches. At the DFT level, the spin density distribution is directly related to the amount of Hartree-Fock exchange introduced in hybrid functionals. At the QMC level, Fixed-node Diffusion Monte Carlo (FN-DMC) results for SD are strongly dependent on the nodal structure of the trial wavefunction employed (here, Hartree-Fock or Kohn-Sham with a particular amount of HF exchange) : in the case of this open-shell system, the 3N -dimensional nodes are mainly determined by the 3-dimensional nodes of the singly occupied molecular orbital. Regarding wavefunction approaches, HF and CASSCF lead to strongly localized spin density on the copper atom, in sharp contrast with DFT. To get a more reliable description and shed some light on the connections between the various theoretical descriptions, Full CI-type (FCI) calculations are performed. To make them feasible for this case a perturbatively selected CI approach generating multi-determinantal expansions of reasonable size and a small tractable basis set are employed. Although semi-quantitative, these near-FCI calculations allow to clarify how the spin density distribution evolves upon inclusion of dynamic correlation effects. A plausible scenario about the nature of the SD is proposed.Comment: 13 pages, 12 Figure

Alternative definition of excitation amplitudes in Multi-Reference state-specific Coupled Cluster

A central difficulty of state-specific Multi-Reference Coupled Cluster (MR-CC) formalisms concerns the definition of the amplitudes of the single and double excitation operators appearing in the exponential wave operator. If the reference space is a complete active space (CAS) the number of these amplitudes is larger than the number of singly and doubly excited determinants on which one may project the eigenequation, and one must impose additional conditions. The present work first defines a state-specific reference-independent operator $\hat{\tilde{T}}^m$ which acting on the CAS component of the wave function $|\Psi_0^m \rangle$ maximizes the overlap between $(1+\hat{\tilde{T}}^m)|\Psi_0^m \rangle$ and the eigenvector of the CAS-SD CI matrix $|\Psi_{\rm CAS-SD}^m \rangle$. This operator may be used to generate approximate coefficients of the Triples and Quadruples, and a dressing of the CAS-SD CI matrix, according to the intermediate Hamiltonian formalism. The process may be iterated to convergence. As a refinement towards a strict Coupled Cluster formalism, one may exploit reference-independent amplitudes provided by $(1+\hat{\tilde{T}}^m)|\Psi_0^m \rangle$ to define a reference-dependent operator $\hat{T}^m$ by fitting the eigenvector of the (dressed) CAS-SD CI matrix. The two variants, which are internally uncontracted, give rather similar results. The new MR-CC version has been tested on the ground state potential energy curves of 6 molecules (up to triple-bond breaking) and a two excited states. The non-parallelism error with respect to the Full-CI curves is of the order of 1 m$E_{\rm h}$.Comment: 11 page

Curing basis-set convergence of wave-function theory using density-functional theory: a systematically improvable approach

The present work proposes to use density-functional theory (DFT) to correct for the basis-set error of wave-function theory (WFT). One of the key ideas developed here is to define a range-separation parameter which automatically adapts to a given basis set. The derivation of the exact equations are based on the Levy-Lieb formulation of DFT, which helps us to define a complementary functional which corrects uniquely for the basis-set error of WFT. The coupling of DFT and WFT is done through the definition of a real-space representation of the electron-electron Coulomb operator projected in a one-particle basis set. Such an effective interaction has the particularity to coincide with the exact electron-electron interaction in the limit of a complete basis set, and to be finite at the electron-electron coalescence point when the basis set is incomplete. The non-diverging character of the effective interaction allows one to define a mapping with the long-range interaction used in the context of range-separated DFT and to design practical approximations for the unknown complementary functional. Here, a local-density approximation is proposed for both full-configuration-interaction (FCI) and selected configuration-interaction approaches. Our theory is numerically tested to compute total energies and ionization potentials for a series of atomic systems. The results clearly show that the DFT correction drastically improves the basis-set convergence of both the total energies and the energy differences. For instance, a sub kcal/mol accuracy is obtained from the aug-cc-pVTZ basis set with the method proposed here when an aug-cc-pV5Z basis set barely reaches such a level of accuracy at the near FCI level