Low-order Scaling $G_0W_0$ by Pair Atomic Density Fitting

Abstract

We derive a low-scaling $G_0W_0$ algorithm for molecules, using pair atomic density fitting (PADF) and an imaginary time representation of the Green's function and describe its implementation in the Slater type orbital (STO) based Amsterdam density functional (ADF) electronic structure code. We demonstrate the scalability of our algorithm on a series of water clusters with up to 432 atoms and 7776 basis functions and observe asymptotic quadratic scaling with realistic threshold qualities controlling distance effects and basis sets of triple-$\zeta$ (TZ) plus double polarization quality. Also owing to a very small prefactor, with these settings a $G_0W_0$ calculation for the largest of these clusters takes only 240 CPU hours. With errors of 0.24 eV for HOMO energies in the GW100 database on the quadruple-$\zeta$ level, our implementation is less accurate than canonical all-electron implementations using the larger def2-QZVP GTO-tpye basis set. Apart from basis set errors, this is related to the well-known shortcomings of the GW space-time method using analytical continuation techniques as well as to numerical issues of the PADF-approach of accurately representing diffuse AO-products. We speculate, that these difficulties might be overcome by using optimized auxiliary fit sets with more diffuse functions of higher angular momenta. Despite these shortcomings, for subsets of medium and large molecules from the GW5000 database, the error of our approach using basis sets of TZ and augmented DZ quality is decreasing with system size. On the augmented DZ level we reproduce canonical, complete basis set limit extrapolated reference values with an accuracy of 80 meV on average for a set of 20 large organic molecules. We anticipate our algorithm, in its current form, to be very useful in the study of single-particle properties of large organic systems such as chromophores and acceptor molecules.