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We present a robust strategy to numerically sample the Coulomb potential in reciprocal space for periodic Born-von Karman cells of general shape. Our approach tackles two common issues of plane-wave based implementations of Coulomb integrals under periodic boundary conditions: the treatment of the singularity at the Brillouin-zone center and discretization errors, which can cause severe convergence problems in anisotropic cells, necessary for the calculation of low-dimensional systems. We apply our strategy to the Hartree-Fock and coupled cluster (CC) theories and discuss the consequences of different sampling strategies on different theories. We show that sampling the Coulomb potential via the widely used probe-charge Ewald method is unsuitable for CC calculations in anisotropic cells. To demonstrate the applicability of our developed approach, we study two representative, low-dimensional use cases: the infinite carbon chain, for which we report the first periodic CCSD(T) potential energy surface, and a surface slab of lithium hydride, for which we demonstrate the impact of different sampling strategies for calculating surface energies. We find that our Coulomb sampling strategy serves as a vital solution, addressing the critical need for improved accuracy in plane-wave based CC calculations for low-dimensional systems., (© 2024 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).)

We present a machine learning approach to calculating electronic specific heat capacities for a variety of benchmark molecular systems. Our models are based on data from density matrix quantum Monte Carlo, which is a stochastic method that can calculate the electronic energy at finite temperature. As these energies typically have noise, numerical derivatives of the energy can be challenging to find reliably. In order to circumvent this problem, we use Gaussian process regression to model the energy and use analytical derivatives to produce the specific heat capacity. From there, we also calculate the entropy by numerical integration. We compare our results to cubic splines and finite differences in a variety of molecules in which Hamiltonians can be diagonalized exactly with full configuration interaction. We finally apply this method to look at larger molecules where exact diagonalization is not possible and make comparisons with more approximate ways to calculate the specific heat capacity and entropy., (© 2023 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.)

We introduce a straightforward Gaussian process regression (GPR) model for the transition structure factor of metal periodic coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) calculations. This is inspired by the method introduced by Liao and Grüneis for interpolating over the transition structure factor to obtain a finite size correction for CCSD [K. Liao and A. Grüneis, J. Chem. Phys. 145, 141102 (2016)] and by our own prior work using the transition structure factor to efficiently converge CCSD for metals to the thermodynamic limit [Mihm et al., Nat. Comput. Sci. 1, 801 (2021)]. In our CCSD-FS-GPR method to correct for finite size errors, we fit the structure factor to a 1D function in the momentum transfer, G. We then integrate over this function by projecting it onto a k-point mesh to obtain comparisons with extrapolated results. Results are shown for lithium, sodium, and the uniform electron gas.

The density matrix quantum Monte Carlo (DMQMC) set of methods stochastically samples the exact N-body density matrix for interacting electrons at finite temperature. We introduce a simple modification to the interaction picture DMQMC (IP-DMQMC) method that overcomes the limitation of only sampling one inverse temperature point at a time, instead allowing for the sampling of a temperature range within a single calculation, thereby reducing the computational cost. At the target inverse temperature, instead of ending the simulation, we incorporate a change of picture away from the interaction picture. The resulting equations of motion have piecewise functions and use the interaction picture in the first phase of a simulation, followed by the application of the Bloch equation once the target inverse temperature is reached. We find that the performance of this method is similar to or better than the DMQMC and IP-DMQMC algorithms in a variety of molecular test systems.

We recently developed a scheme to use low-cost calculations to find a single twist angle where the coupled cluster doubles energy of a single calculation matches the twist-averaged coupled cluster doubles energy in a finite unit cell. We used initiator full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo as an example of an exact method beyond coupled cluster doubles theory to show that this selected twist angle approach had comparable accuracy in methods beyond coupled cluster. Furthermore, at least for small system sizes, we show that the same twist angle can also be found by comparing the energy directly (at the level of second-order Moller-Plesset theory), suggesting a route toward twist angle selection, which requires minimal modification to existing codes that can perform twist averaging.

We present NECI, a state-of-the-art implementation of the Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) algorithm, a method based on a stochastic application of the Hamiltonian matrix on a sparse sampling of the wave function. The program utilizes a very powerful parallelization and scales efficiently to more than 24 000 central processing unit cores. In this paper, we describe the core functionalities of NECI and its recent developments. This includes the capabilities to calculate ground and excited state energies, properties via the one- and two-body reduced density matrices, as well as spectral and Green's functions for ab initio and model systems. A number of enhancements of the bare FCIQMC algorithm are available within NECI, allowing us to use a partially deterministic formulation of the algorithm, working in a spin-adapted basis or supporting transcorrelated Hamiltonians. NECI supports the FCIDUMP file format for integrals, supplying a convenient interface to numerous quantum chemistry programs, and it is licensed under GPL-3.0.

We explore an alternative to twist averaging in order to obtain more cost-effective and accurate extrapolations to the thermodynamic limit (TDL) for coupled cluster doubles (CCD) calculations. We seek a single twist angle to perform calculations at, instead of integrating over many random points or a grid. We introduce the concept of connectivity, a quantity derived from the nonzero four-index integrals in an MP2 calculation. This allows us to find a special twist angle that provides appropriate connectivity in the energy equation, which yields results comparable to full twist averaging. This special twist angle effectively makes the finite electron number CCD calculation represent the TDL more accurately, reducing the cost of twist-averaged CCD over N s twist angles from N s CCD calculations to N s MP2 calculations plus one CCD calculation.

Basis set incompleteness error and finite size error can manifest concurrently in systems for which the two effects are phenomenologically well-separated in length scale. When this is true, we need not necessarily remove the two sources of error simultaneously. Instead, the errors can be found and remedied in different parts of the basis set. This would be of great benefit to a method such as coupled cluster theory since the combined cost of nocc (6)nvirt (4) could be separated into nocc (6) and nvirt (4) costs with smaller prefactors. In this Communication, we present analysis on a data set due to Baardsen and co-workers, containing 2D uniform electron gas coupled cluster doubles energies for rs = 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 a.u. at a wide range of basis set sizes and particle numbers. In obtaining complete basis set limit thermodynamic limit results, we find that within a small and removable error the above assertion is correct for this simple system. We then use this method to obtain similar results for the 3D electron gas at rs = 1.0, 2.0, and 5.0 a.u. and make comparison to the Ceperley-Alder quantum Monte Carlo results. This approach allows for the combination of methods which separately address finite size effects and basis set incompleteness error.

Over the past few years, pair coupled cluster doubles (pCCD) has shown promise for the description of strong correlation. This promise is related to its apparent ability to match results from doubly occupied configuration interaction (DOCI), even though the latter method has exponential computational cost. Here, by modifying the full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo algorithm to sample only the seniority zero sector of Hilbert space, we show that the DOCI and pCCD energies are in agreement for a variety of 2D Hubbard models, including for systems well out of reach for conventional configuration interaction algorithms. Our calculations are aided by the sign problem being much reduced in the seniority zero space compared with the full space. We present evidence for this and then discuss the sign problem in terms of the wave function of the system which appears to have a simplified sign structure.

The recently developed density matrix quantum Monte Carlo (DMQMC) algorithm stochastically samples the N-body thermal density matrix and hence provides access to exact properties of many-particle quantum systems at arbitrary temperatures. We demonstrate that moving to the interaction picture provides substantial benefits when applying DMQMC to interacting fermions. In this first study, we focus on a system of much recent interest: the uniform electron gas in the warm dense regime. The basis set incompleteness error at finite temperature is investigated and extrapolated via a simple Monte Carlo sampling procedure. Finally, we provide benchmark calculations for a four-electron system, comparing our results to previous work where possible.

Properties that are necessarily formulated within pure (symmetric) expectation values are difficult to calculate for projector quantum Monte Carlo approaches, but are critical in order to compute many of the important observable properties of electronic systems. Here, we investigate an approach for the sampling of unbiased reduced density matrices within the full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo dynamic, which requires only small computational overheads. This is achieved via an independent replica population of walkers in the dynamic, sampled alongside the original population. The resulting reduced density matrices are free from systematic error (beyond those present via constraints on the dynamic itself) and can be used to compute a variety of expectation values and properties, with rapid convergence to an exact limit. A quasi-variational energy estimate derived from these density matrices is proposed as an accurate alternative to the projected estimator for multiconfigurational wavefunctions, while its variational property could potentially lend itself to accurate extrapolation approaches in larger systems.

We discuss diagrammatic modifications to the coupled cluster doubles (CCD) equations, wherein different groups of terms out of rings, ladders, crossed-rings, and mosaics can be removed to form approximations to the coupled cluster method, of interest due to their similarity with various types of random phase approximations. The finite uniform electron gas (UEG) is benchmarked for 14- and 54-electron systems at the complete basis set limit over a wide density range and performance of different flavours of CCD is determined. These results confirm that rings generally overcorrelate and ladders generally undercorrelate; mosaics-only CCD yields a result surprisingly close to CCD. We use a recently developed numerical analysis [J. J. Shepherd and A. Grüneis, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 226401 (2013)] to study the behaviours of these methods in the thermodynamic limit. We determine that the mosaics, on forming the Brueckner one-body Hamiltonian, open a gap in the effective one-particle eigenvalues at the Fermi energy. Numerical evidence is presented which shows that methods based on this renormalisation have convergent energies in the thermodynamic limit including mosaic-only CCD, which is just a renormalised MP2. All other methods including only a single channel, namely, ladder-only CCD, ring-only CCD, and crossed-ring-only CCD, appear to yield divergent energies; incorporation of mosaic terms prevents this from happening.

We present an investigation into the use of an explicitly correlated plane wave basis for periodic wavefunction expansions at the level of second-order Møller-Plesset (MP2) perturbation theory. The convergence of the electronic correlation energy with respect to the one-electron basis set is investigated and compared to conventional MP2 theory in a finite homogeneous electron gas model. In addition to the widely used Slater-type geminal correlation factor, we also derive and investigate a novel correlation factor that we term Yukawa-Coulomb. The Yukawa-Coulomb correlation factor is motivated by analytic results for two electrons in a box and allows for a further improved convergence of the correlation energies with respect to the employed basis set. We find the combination of the infinitely delocalized plane waves and local short-ranged geminals provides a complementary, and rapidly convergent basis for the description of periodic wavefunctions. We hope that this approach will expand the scope of discrete wavefunction expansions in periodic systems.

Using the homogeneous electron gas (HEG) as a model, we investigate the sources of error in the "initiator" adaptation to full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (i-FCIQMC), with a view to accelerating convergence. In particular, we find that the fixed-shift phase, where the walker number is allowed to grow slowly, can be used to effectively assess stochastic and initiator error. Using this approach we provide simple explanations for the internal parameters of an i-FCIQMC simulation. We exploit the consistent basis sets and adjustable correlation strength of the HEG to analyze properties of the algorithm, and present finite basis benchmark energies for N = 14 over a range of densities 0.5 ≤ r(s) ≤ 5.0 a.u. A single-point extrapolation scheme is introduced to produce complete basis energies for 14, 38, and 54 electrons. It is empirically found that, in the weakly correlated regime, the computational cost scales linearly with the plane wave basis set size, which is justifiable on physical grounds. We expect the fixed-shift strategy to reduce the computational cost of many i-FCIQMC calculations of weakly correlated systems. In addition, we provide benchmarks for the electron gas, to be used by other quantum chemical methods in exploring periodic solid state systems.