A quantum Monte Carlo study of systems with effective core potentials and node nonlinearities

Haihan Zhou, Anthony Scemama, Guangming Wang, Abdulgani Annaberdiyev, Benjamin Kincaid, Michel Caffarel, Lubos Mitas

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study beryllium dihydride (BeH2) and acetylene (C2H2) molecules using real-space diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) method. The molecules serve as perhaps the simplest prototypes that illustrate the difficulties with biases in the fixed-node DMC calculations that might appear with the use of effective core potentials (ECPs) or other nonlocal operators. This is especially relevant for the recently introduced correlation consistent ECPs (ccECPs) for 2s2p elements. Corresponding ccECPs exhibit deeper potential functions due to higher fidelity to all-electron counterparts, which could lead to larger local energy fluctuations. We point out that the difficulties stem from issues that are straightforward to address by upgrades of basis sets, use of T-moves for nonlocal terms, inclusion of a few configurations into the trial function and similar. The resulting accuracy corresponds to the ccECP target (chemical accuracy) and it is in consistent agreement with independent correlated calculations. Further possibilities for upgrading the reliability of the DMC algorithm and considerations for better adapted and more robust Jastrow factors are discussed as well.

Original languageEnglish
Article number111402
JournalChemical Physics
Volume554
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 1 2022
Externally publishedYes

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge support by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics under the award de-sc0012314. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Keywords

  • Diffusion Monte Carlo
  • Effective core potentials
  • Node nonlinearity
  • T-moves

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