Benchmark Phaseless Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo Method for Small Molecules

Author(s)
Zoran Sukurma, Martin Schlipf, Moritz Humer, Amir Taheridehkordi, Georg Kresse
Abstract

We report a scalable Fortran implementation of the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) and demonstrate its excellent performance and beneficial scaling with respect to system size. Furthermore, we investigate modifications of the phaseless approximation that can help to reduce the overcorrelation problems common to the ph-AFQMC. We apply the method to the 26 molecules in the HEAT set, the benzene molecule, and water clusters. We observe a mean absolute deviation of the total energy of 1.15 kcal/mol for the molecules in the HEAT set, close to chemical accuracy. For the benzene molecule, the modified algorithm despite using a single-Slater-determinant trial wavefunction yields the same accuracy as the original phaseless scheme with 400 Slater determinants. Despite these improvements, we find systematic errors for the CN, CO2, and O2 molecules that need to be addressed with more accurate trial wavefunctions. For water clusters, we find that the ph-AFQMC yields excellent binding energies that differ from CCSD(T) by typically less than 0.5 kcal/mol.

Organisation(s)
Computational Materials Physics
External organisation(s)
VASP Software GmbH
Journal
Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation
Volume
19
Pages
4921–4934
No. of pages
14
ISSN
1549-9618
DOI
https://doi.org/https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04256v1
Publication date
07-2023
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103043 Computational physics, 103006 Chemical physics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Computer Science Applications, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/benchmark-phaseless-auxiliaryfield-quantum-monte-carlo-method-for-small-molecules(765a9a17-e565-4789-a7ce-ff3bd8d901b3).html