No Arabic abstract
Given a partition of a large system into an active quantum mechanical (QM) region and its environment, we present a simple way of embedding the QM region into an effective electrostatic potential representing the environment. This potential is generated by partitioning the environment into well defined fragments, and assigning each one a set of electrostatic multipoles, which can then be used to build up the electrostatic potential. We show that, providing the fragments and the projection scheme for the multipoles are chosen properly, this leads to an effective electrostatic embedding of the active QM region which is of equal quality as a full QM calculation. We coupled our formalism to the DFT code BigDFT, which uses a minimal set of localized in-situ optimized basis functions; this property eases the fragment definition while still describing the electronic structure with great precision. Thanks to the linear scaling capabilities of BigDFT, we can compare the modeling of the electrostatic embedding with results coming from unbiased full QM calculations of the entire system. This enables a reliable and controllable setup of an effective coarse-graining approach, coupling together different levels of description, which yields a considerable reduction in the degrees of freedom and thus paves the way towards efficient QM/QM and QM/MM methods for the treatment of very large systems.
With the development of low order scaling methods for performing Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory, it is now possible to perform fully quantum mechanical calculations of systems containing tens of thousands of atoms. However, with an increase in the size of system treated comes an increase in complexity, making it challenging to analyze such large systems and determine the cause of emergent properties. To address this issue, in this paper we present a systematic complexity reduction methodology which can break down large systems into their constituent fragments, and quantify inter-fragment interactions. The methodology proposed here requires no a priori information or user interaction, allowing a single workflow to be automatically applied to any system of interest. We apply this approach to a variety of different systems, and show how it allows for the derivation of new system descriptors, the design of QM/MM partitioning schemes, and the novel application of graph metrics to molecules and materials.
Vibrational spectra can be computed without storing full-dimensional vectors by using low-rank sum-of-products (SOP) basis functions. We introduce symmetry constraints in the SOP basis functions to make it possible to separately calculate states in different symmetry subgroups. This is done using a power method to compute eigenvalues and an alternating least squares method to optimize basis functions. Owing to the fact that the power method favours the convergence of the lowest states, one must be careful not to exclude basis functions of some symmetries. Exploiting symmetry facilitates making assignments and improves the accuracy. The method is applied to the acetonitrile molecule.
In this paper, we introduce a multiscale framework based on adaptive edge basis functions to solve second-order linear elliptic PDEs with rough coefficients. One of the main results is that we prove the proposed multiscale method achieves nearly exponential convergence in the approximation error with respect to the computational degrees of freedom. Our strategy is to perform an energy orthogonal decomposition of the solution space into a coarse scale component comprising $a$-harmonic functions in each element of the mesh, and a fine scale component named the bubble part that can be computed locally and efficiently. The coarse scale component depends entirely on function values on edges. Our approximation on each edge is made in the Lions-Magenes space $H_{00}^{1/2}(e)$, which we will demonstrate to be a natural and powerful choice. We construct edge basis functions using local oversampling and singular value decomposition. When local information of the right-hand side is adaptively incorporated into the edge basis functions, we prove a nearly exponential convergence rate of the approximation error. Numerical experiments validate and extend our theoretical analysis; in particular, we observe no obvious degradation in accuracy for high-contrast media problems.
There are many ways to numerically represent of chemical systems in order to compute their electronic structure. Basis functions may be localized in real-space (atomic orbitals), in momentum-space (plane waves), or in both components of phase-space. Such phase-space localized basis functions in the form of wavelets, have been used for many years in electronic structure. In this paper, we turn to a phase-space localized basis set first introduced by K. G. Wilson. We provide the first full study of this basis and its numerical implementation. To calculate electronic energies of a variety of small molecules and states, we utilize the sum-of-products form, Gaussian quadratures, and introduce methods for selecting sample points from a grid of phase-space localized Wilson basis. Both full configuration interaction and Hartree-Fock implementations are discussed and implemented numerically. As with many grid based methods, describing both tightly bound and diffuse orbitals is challenging so we have considered augmenting the Wilson basis set as projected Slater-type orbitals. We have also compared the Wilson basis set against the recently introduced wavelet transformed Gaussians (gausslets). Throughout, we give comments on the implementation and use small atoms and molecules to illustrate convergence properties of the Wilson basis.
Density Functional Theory (DFT) has become the quasi-standard for ab-initio simulations for a wide range of applications. While the intrinsic cubic scaling of DFT was for a long time limiting the accessible system size to some hundred atoms, the recent progress with respect to linear scaling DFT methods has allowed to tackle problems that are larger by many orders of magnitudes. However, as these linear scaling methods were developed for insulators, they cannot, in general, be straightforwardly applied to metals, as a finite temperature is needed to ensure locality of the density matrix. In this paper we show that, once finite electronic temperature is employed, the linear scaling version of the BigDFT code is able to exploit this locality to provide a computational treatment that scales linearly with respect to the number of atoms of a metallic system. We provide prototype examples based on bulk Tungsten, which plays a key role in finding safe and long-lasting materials for Fusion Reactors. We believe that such an approach might help in opening the path towards novel approaches for investigating the electronic structure of such materials, in particular when large supercells are required.