No Arabic abstract
The recently developed semistochastic heat-bath configuration interaction (SHCI) method is a systematically improvable selected configuration interaction plus perturbation theory method capable of giving essentially exact energies for larger systems than is possible with other such methods. We compute SHCI atomization energies for 55 molecules which have been used as a test set in prior studies because their atomization energies are known from experiment. Basis sets from cc-pVDZ to cc-pV5Z are used, totaling up to 500 orbitals and a Hilbert space of $10^{32}$ Slater determinants for the largest molecules. For each basis, an extrapolated energy well within chemical accuracy (1 kcal/mol or 1.6 mHa/mol) of the exact energy for that basis is computed using only a tiny fraction of the entire Hilbert space. We also use our almost exact energies to benchmark coupled-cluster [CCSD(T)] energies. The energies are extrapolated to the complete basis set limit and compared to the experimental atomization energies. The extrapolations are done both without and with a basis-set correction based on density-functional theory. The mean absolute deviations from experiment for these extrapolations are 0.46 kcal/mol and 0.51 kcal/mol, respectively. Orbital optimization methods used to obtain improved convergence of the SHCI energies are also discussed.
We extend the recently proposed heat-bath configuration interaction (HCI) method [Holmes, Tubman, Umrigar, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 12, 3674 (2016)], by introducing a semistochastic algorithm for performing multireference Epstein-Nesbet perturbation theory, in order to completely eliminate the severe memory bottleneck of the original method. The proposed algorithm has several attractive features. First, there is no sign problem that plagues several quantum Monte Carlo methods. Second, instead of using Metropolis-Hastings sampling, we use the Alias method to directly sample determinants from the reference wavefunction, thus avoiding correlations between consecutive samples. Third, in addition to removing the memory bottleneck, semistochastic HCI (SHCI) is faster than the deterministic variant for many systems if a stochastic error of 0.1 mHa is acceptable. Fourth, within the SHCI algorithm one can trade memory for a modest increase in computer time. Fifth, the perturbative calculation is embarrassingly parallel. The SHCI algorithm extends the range of applicability of the original algorithm, allowing us to calculate the correlation energy of very large active spaces. We demonstrate this by performing calculations on several first row dimers including F2 with an active space of (14e, 108o), Mn-Salen cluster with an active space of (28e, 22o), and Cr2 dimer with up to a quadruple-zeta basis set with an active space of (12e, 190o). For these systems we were able to obtain better than 1 mHa accuracy with a wall time of merely 55 seconds, 37 seconds, and 56 minutes on 1, 1, and 4 nodes, respectively.
We introduce vibrational heat-bath configuration interaction (VHCI) as an accurate and efficient method for calculating vibrational eigenstates of anharmonic systems. Inspired by its origin in electronic structure theory, VHCI is a selected CI approach that uses a simple criterion to identify important basis states with a pre-sorted list of anharmonic force constants. Screened second-order perturbation theory and simple extrapolation techniques provide significant improvements to variational energy estimates. We benchmark VHCI on four molecules with 12 to 48 degrees of freedom and use anharmonic potential energy surfaces truncated at fourth and sixth order. For all molecules studied, VHCI produces vibrational spectra of tens or hundreds of states with sub-wavenumber accuracy at low computational cost.
We extend our recently-developed heat-bath configuration interaction (HCI) algorithm, and our semistochastic algorithm for performing multireference perturbation theory, to the calculation of excited-state wavefunctions and energies. We employ time-reversal symmetry, which reduces the memory requirements by more than a factor of two. An extrapolation technique is introduced to reliably extrapolate HCI energies to the Full CI limit. The resulting algorithm is used to compute the twelve lowest-lying potential energy surfaces of the carbon dimer using the cc-pV5Z basis set, with an estimated error in energy of 30-50 {mu}Ha compared to Full CI. The excitation energies obtained using our algorithm have a mean absolute deviation of 0.02 eV compared to experimental values. We also calculate the complete active-space (CAS) energies of the S0, S1, and T0 states of tetracene, which are of relevance to singlet fission, by fully correlating active spaces as large as 18 electrons in 36 orbitals.
We introduce a new selected configuration interaction plus perturbation theory algorithm that is based on a deterministic analog of our recent efficient heat-bath sampling algorithm. This Heat-bath Configuration Interaction (HCI) algorithm makes use of two parameters that control the tradeoff between speed and accuracy, one which controls the selection of determinants to add to a variational wavefunction, and one which controls the the selection of determinants used to compute the perturbative correction to the variational energy. We show that HCI provides an accurate treatment of both static and dynamic correlation by computing the potential energy curve of the multireference carbon dimer in the cc-pVDZ basis. We then demonstrate the speed and accuracy of HCI by recovering the full configuration interaction energy of both the carbon dimer in the cc-pVTZ basis and the strongly-correlated chromium dimer in the Ahlrichs VDZ basis, correlating all electrons, to an accuracy of better than 1 mHa, in just a few minutes on a single core. These systems have full variational spaces of 3x10^14 and 2x10^22 determinants respectively.
The electronically excited states of methylene (CH$_2$), ethylene (C$_2$H$_4$), butadiene (C$_4$H$_6$), hexatriene (C$_6$H$_8$), and ozone (O$_3$) have long proven challenging due to their complex mixtures of static and dynamic correlations. Semistochastic heat-bath configuration interaction (SHCI), which efficiently and systematically approaches the full configuration interaction (FCI) limit, is used to provide close approximations to the FCI energies in these systems. This article presents the largest FCI-level calculation to date -- on hexatriene using a polarized double-zeta basis (ANO-L-pVDZ), which gives rise to a Hilbert space containing more than $10^{38}$ determinants. These calculations give vertical excitation energies of 5.58 and 5.59 eV respectively for the $2^1{rm A}_{rm g}$ and $1^1{rm B}_{rm u}$ states, showing that they are nearly degenerate. The same excitation energies in butadiene/ANO-L-pVDZ were found to be 6.58 and 6.45 eV. In addition to these benchmarks, our calculations strongly support the presence of a previously hypothesized ring-minimum species of ozone that lies 1.3 eV higher than the open-ring minimum energy structure and is separated from it by a barrier of 1.11 eV.