Hybrid stochastic-deterministic calculation of the second-order perturbative contribution of multireference perturbation theory

A hybrid stochastic-deterministic approach for computing the second-order perturbative contribution $E^{(2)}$ within multireference perturbation theory (MRPT) is presented. The idea at the heart of our hybrid scheme --- based on a reformulation of $E^{(2)}$ as a sum of elementary contributions associated with each determinant of the MR wave function --- is to split $E^{(2)}$ into a stochastic and a deterministic part. During the simulation, the stochastic part is gradually reduced by dynamically increasing the deterministic part until one reaches the desired accuracy. In sharp contrast with a purely stochastic MC scheme where the error decreases indefinitely as $t^{-1/2}$ (where $t$ is the computational time), the statistical error in our hybrid algorithm displays a polynomial decay $\sim t^{-n}$ with $n=3-4$ in the examples considered here. If desired, the calculation can be carried on until the stochastic part entirely vanishes. In that case, the exact result is obtained with no error bar and no noticeable computational overhead compared to the fully-deterministic calculation. The method is illustrated on the F$_2$ and Cr$_2$ molecules. Even for the largest case corresponding to the Cr$_2$ molecule treated with the cc-pVQZ basis set, very accurate results are obtained for $E^{(2)}$ for an active space of (28e,176o) and a MR wave function including up to $2 \times 10^7$ determinants.Comment: 8 pages, 5 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

A Jeziorski-Monkhorst fully uncontracted Multi-Reference perturbative treatment I: principles, second-order versions and tests on ground state potential energy curves

The present paper introduces a new multi-reference perturbation approach developed at second order, based on a Jeziorsky-Mokhorst expansion using individual Slater determinants as perturbers. Thanks to this choice of perturbers, an effective Hamiltonian may be built, allowing for the dressing of the Hamiltonian matrix within the reference space, assumed here to be a CAS-CI. Such a formulation accounts then for the coupling between the static and dynamic correlation effects. With our new definition of zeroth-order energies, these two approaches are strictly size-extensive provided that local orbitals are used, as numerically illustrated here and formally demonstrated in the appendix. Also, the present formalism allows for the factorization of all double excitation operators, just as in internally contracted approaches, strongly reducing the computational cost of these two approaches with respect to other determinant-based perturbation theories. The accuracy of these methods has been investigated on ground-state potential curves up to full dissociation limits for a set of six molecules involving single, double and triple bond breaking. The spectroscopic constants obtained with the present methods are found to be in very good agreement with the full configuration interaction (FCI) results. As the present formalism does not use any parameter or numerically unstable operation, the curves obtained with the two methods are smooth all along the dissociation path.Comment: 4 figures, 18 page

Self-Consistent Electron-Nucleus Cusp Correction for Molecular Orbitals

We describe a method for imposing the correct electron-nucleus (e-n) cusp in molecular orbitals expanded as a linear combination of (cuspless) Gaussian basis functions. Enforcing the e-n cusp in trial wave functions is an important asset in quantum Monte Carlo calculations as it significantly reduces the variance of the local energy during the Monte Carlo sampling. In the method presented here, the Gaussian basis set is augmented with a small number of Slater basis functions. Note that, unlike other e-n cusp correction schemes, the presence of the Slater function is not limited to the vicinity of the nuclei. Both the coefficients of these cuspless Gaussian and cusp-correcting Slater basis functions may be self-consistently optimized by diagonalization of an orbital-dependent effective Fock operator. Illustrative examples are reported for atoms (\ce{H}, \ce{He} and \ce{Ne}) as well as for a small molecular system (\ce{BeH2}). For the simple case of the \ce{He} atom, we observe that, with respect to the cuspless version, the variance is reduced by one order of magnitude by applying our cusp-corrected scheme.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure

Interplay between electronic correlation and metal-ligand delocalization in the spectroscopy of transition metal compounds: case study on a series of planar Cu2+^{2+} complexes

We present a comprehensive theoretical study of the physical phenomena that determine the relative energies of the three of the lowest electronic states of each of the square-planar copper complexes \cucl, \cunh and \cuwater, and present a detailed analysis of the extent to which truncated configuration interaction (CI) and coupled cluster (CC) theories succeed in predicing the excitation energies. We find that ligand-metal charge transfer (CT) single excitations play a crucial role in the correct determination of the properties of these systems, even though the CT processes first occur at fourth order in perturbation theory, and propose a suitable choice of minimal active space for describing these systems with multi-reference theories. CCSD energy differences agree very well with near full CI values even though the $T_1$ diagnostics are large, which casts doubt on the usefulness of singles-amplitude based multi-reference diagnostics. CISD severely underestimates the excitation energies and the failure is a direct consequence of the size-inconsisency errors in CISD. Finally, we present reference values for the energy differences computed using explicitly correlated CCSD(T) and BCCD(T) theory.Comment: 33 pages, 14 figure

Development and parallel implementation of selected configuration interaction methods

Cette thèse, ayant pour thème les algorithmes de la chimie quantique, s'inscrit dans le cade du changement de paradigme observé depuis une douzaines d'années, dans lequel les méthodes de calcul séquentielles se doivent d'être progressivement remplacées par des méthodes parallèles. En effet, l'augmentation de la fréquences des processeurs se heurtant à des barrières physiques difficilement franchissables, l'augmentation de la puissance de calcul se fait par l'augmentation du nombre d'unités de calcul. Toutefois, là où une augmentation de la fréquence conduisait mécaniquement à une exécution plus rapide d'un code, l'augmentation du nombre de cœurs peut se heurter à des barrières algorithmiques, qui peuvent nécessiter une adaptation ou un changement d'algorithme. Parmi les méthodes développées afin de contourner ce problème, on trouve en particulier celles de type Monte-Carlo (stochastiques), qui sont intrinsèquement "embarrassingly parallel", c'est à dire qu'elles sont par construction constituées d'une multitudes de tâches indépendantes, et de ce fait particulièrement adaptées aux architectures massivement parallèles. Elles ont également l'avantage, dans de nombreux cas, d'être capables de produire un résultat approché pour une fraction du coût calculatoire de l'équivalent déterministe exacte. Lors de cette thèse, des implémentations massivement parallèles de certains algorithmes déterministes de chimie quantique ont été réalisées. Il s'agit des algorithmes suivants : CIPSI, diagonalisation de Davidson, calcul de la perturbation au second ordre, shifted-Bk, et Coupled Cluster Multi Références. Pour certains, une composante stochastique a été introduite en vue d'améliorer leur efficacité. Toutes ces méthodes ont été implémentées sur un modèle de tâches distribuées en TCP, où un processus central distribue des tâches par le réseau et collecte les résultats. En d'autres termes, des nœuds esclaves peuvent être ajoutés au cours du calcul depuis n'importe quelle machine accessible depuis internet. L'efficacité parallèle des algorithmes implémentés dans cette thèse a été étudiée, et le programme a pu donner lieu à de nombreuses applications, notamment pour permettre d'obtenir des énergies de références pour des systèmes moléculaires difficiles.This thesis, whose topic is quantum chemistry algorithms, is made in the context of the change in paradigm that has been going on for the last decade, in which the usual sequential algorithms are progressively replaced by parallel equivalents. Indeed, the increase in processors' frequency is challenged by physical barriers, so increase in computational power is achieved through increasing the number of cores. However, where an increase of frequency mechanically leads to a faster execution of a code, an increase in number of cores may be challenged by algorithmic barriers, which may require adapting of even changing the algorithm. Among methods developed to circumvent this issue, we find in particular Monte-Carlo methods (stochastic methods), which are intrinsically "embarrassingly parallel", meaning they are by design composed of a large number of independent tasks, and thus, particularly well-adapted to massively parallel architectures. In addition, they often are able to yield an approximate result for just a fraction of the cost of the equivalent deterministic, exact computation. During this thesis, massively parallel implementations of some deterministic quantum chemistry algorithms were realized. Those methods are: CIPSI, Davidson diagonalization, computation of second-order perturbation, shifted-Bk, Multi-Reference Coupled-Cluster. For some of these, a stochastic aspect was introduced in order to improve their efficiency. All of them were implemented on a distributed task model, with a central process distributing tasks and collecting results. In other words, slave nodes can be added during the computation from any location reachable through Internet. The efficiency for the implemented algorithms has been studied, and the code could give way to numerous applications, in particular to obtain reference energies for difficult molecular systems

Développement et implémentation parallèle de méthodes d'interaction de configurations sélectionnées

This thesis, whose topic is quantum chemistry algorithms, is made in the context of the change in paradigm that has been going on for the last decade, in which the usual sequential algorithms are progressively replaced by parallel equivalents. Indeed, the increase in processors' frequency is challenged by physical barriers, so increase in computational power is achieved through increasing the number of cores. However, where an increase of frequency mechanically leads to a faster execution of a code, an increase in number of cores may be challenged by algorithmic barriers, which may require adapting of even changing the algorithm. Among methods developed to circumvent this issue, we find in particular Monte-Carlo methods (stochastic methods), which are intrinsically "embarrassingly parallel", meaning they are by design composed of a large number of independent tasks, and thus, particularly well-adapted to massively parallel architectures. In addition, they often are able to yield an approximate result for just a fraction of the cost of the equivalent deterministic, exact computation. During this thesis, massively parallel implementations of some deterministic quantum chemistry algorithms were realized. Those methods are: CIPSI, Davidson diagonalization, computation of second-order perturbation, shifted-Bk, Multi-Reference Coupled-Cluster. For some of these, a stochastic aspect was introduced in order to improve their efficiency. All of them were implemented on a distributed task model, with a central process distributing tasks and collecting results. In other words, slave nodes can be added during the computation from any location reachable through Internet. The efficiency for the implemented algorithms has been studied, and the code could give way to numerous applications, in particular to obtain reference energies for difficult molecular systems.Cette thèse, ayant pour thème les algorithmes de la chimie quantique, s'inscrit dans le cade du changement de paradigme observé depuis une douzaines d'années, dans lequel les méthodes de calcul séquentielles se doivent d'être progressivement remplacées par des méthodes parallèles. En effet, l'augmentation de la fréquences des processeurs se heurtant à des barrières physiques difficilement franchissables, l'augmentation de la puissance de calcul se fait par l'augmentation du nombre d'unités de calcul. Toutefois, là où une augmentation de la fréquence conduisait mécaniquement à une exécution plus rapide d'un code, l'augmentation du nombre de cœurs peut se heurter à des barrières algorithmiques, qui peuvent nécessiter une adaptation ou un changement d'algorithme. Parmi les méthodes développées afin de contourner ce problème, on trouve en particulier celles de type Monte-Carlo (stochastiques), qui sont intrinsèquement "embarrassingly parallel", c'est à dire qu'elles sont par construction constituées d'une multitudes de tâches indépendantes, et de ce fait particulièrement adaptées aux architectures massivement parallèles. Elles ont également l'avantage, dans de nombreux cas, d'être capables de produire un résultat approché pour une fraction du coût calculatoire de l'équivalent déterministe exacte. Lors de cette thèse, des implémentations massivement parallèles de certains algorithmes déterministes de chimie quantique ont été réalisées. Il s'agit des algorithmes suivants : CIPSI, diagonalisation de Davidson, calcul de la perturbation au second ordre, shifted-Bk, et Coupled Cluster Multi Références. Pour certains, une composante stochastique a été introduite en vue d'améliorer leur efficacité. Toutes ces méthodes ont été implémentées sur un modèle de tâches distribuées en TCP, où un processus central distribue des tâches par le réseau et collecte les résultats. En d'autres termes, des nœuds esclaves peuvent être ajoutés au cours du calcul depuis n'importe quelle machine accessible depuis internet. L'efficacité parallèle des algorithmes implémentés dans cette thèse a été étudiée, et le programme a pu donner lieu à de nombreuses applications, notamment pour permettre d'obtenir des énergies de références pour des systèmes moléculaires difficiles