arXiv subjects

Anthony Scemama

Publications and source records attributed to Anthony Scemama.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

First-order Degenerate Symmetry-Adapted Perturbation Theory

Degenerate electronic states govern the photophysics of excimers and the molecular dynamics near conical intersections. In regions where potential energy surfaces are degenerate or nearly degenerate, intermolecular interactions mix the corresponding electronic configurations. We introduce a first-order degenerate formulation of symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (dSAPT) with weak symmetry forcing that quantifies the mixing in terms of electrostatic and exchange (Pauli repulsion) contributions. We compare two alternative ways of resolving the degeneracy, in which antisymmetry is enforced either after or before diagonalization of the first-order eigenproblem. Using CASSCF monomer wave functions, we apply dSAPT to two model spatially degenerate systems, H$_2$--F(${}^2P$) and H$_2$--NO(${}^2\Pi$), and show that exchange effects contribute significantly to configuration mixing already at intermediate intermolecular separations. For the H$_2$--NO(${}^2\Pi$) complex, we further demonstrate that second-order dispersion energy is essential for qualitatively reproducing the angular dependence of the diabatic mixing angle. Finally, using water and benzene excimers with monomers described either by CASSCF or CIS wave functions, we show that Pauli repulsion controls delocalization of the excitation at short intermolecular separations.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2026

Self-Healing Diffusion Monte Carlo applied to a simple fermionic model: A critical assessment of the method

We investigate the Self-Healing Diffusion Monte Carlo (SHDMC) method using a one-dimensional model with periodic boundary conditions. An inversion symmetry is introduced to mimic the antisymmetry property of fermionic wavefunctions, with the bosonic and fermionic sectors being modeled by the even and odd eigenstates, respectively. As in realistic fermionic systems, the nodal structure is only partially constrained by symmetry, making this model a non-trivial testbed for nodal optimization algorithms such as SHDMC. We show that the nodal evolution under SHDMC iterations can be cast into a dynamical system exhibiting both attractive and repulsive fixed points. In the standard formulation of SHDMC applied to this model, the fixed-node energy is found to increase upon iteration, and the node converges to a wrong value, indicating that SHDMC does not always converge to the correct solution. We further show that this problem is partially cured by modifying the nodal update criterion to give more importance to the nodal region. Achieving convergence in the general case very likely requires the use of a localized basis set, as is the case for this model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Transcorrelated Random-Phase Approximation

We extend the random-phase approximation (RPA) to the non-Hermitian transcorrelated (TC) Hamiltonian, which explicitly includes three-body interactions generated by a Jastrow correlation factor. We consider both the direct RPA (dRPA) and RPA with exchange (RPAx). We apply the resulting TC-dRPA and TC-RPAx methods to calculate ground-state correlation energies and vertical excitation energies for atoms (\ce{He} and \ce{Ne}) and small molecules (\ce{H2O}, \ce{NH3}, \ce{CH4}, and \ce{H2CO}). For ground-state correlation energies, the TC treatment substantially improves accuracy and accelerates basis set convergence, reducing errors by nearly an order of magnitude relative to conventional RPA calculations. By contrast, it yields only marginal improvements in vertical excitation energies. We attribute this limited effect to the ground-state optimization of the Jastrow factor, which does not adequately capture the distinct electronic character of excited states. These results establish TC-RPA as an accurate and computationally efficient approach to ground-state energetics, while highlighting the need for state-specific Jastrow optimization to achieve reliable descriptions of excited states.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2026

Correcting basis-set errors due to the absence of the electron-electron cusp using an adiabatic correction

This article proposes an analytical method to address the slow convergence of electronic structure calculations caused by the inability of finite one-particle basis sets to describe the electron-electron cusp. An equivalence is established between a calculation using a finite basis set with the physical Coulomb interaction and a calculation using a complete basis set with a model interaction (specifically, the error-function screened Coulomb potential characterized by a range-separation parameter $\mu$). By leveraging the adiabatic connection formalism, a simple, parameter-free correction formula is derived. It depends only on the on-top pair density and a locally defined range-separation parameter ($\mu$) derived from the basis set itself. This `adiabatic connection based basis-set error correction' (ABC) is derived from the asymptotic expansion of the wave function at large $\mu$ for small inter-electronic distances. Therefore it is applicable to both ground and excited states without the restriction imposed by the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem. Numerical tests illustrate that the method achieves chemical accuracy using smaller basis sets than typically required.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2025

QMCkl: A Kernel Library for Quantum Monte Carlo Applications

Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods deliver highly accurate electronic structure calculations but are computationally intensive. The quantum Monte Carlo kernel library (QMCkl) provides a modular, portable collection of high-performance kernels implementing the core building blocks of QMC calculations. It offers a C-compatible API, supports the TREXIO standard for input, and covers essential QMC kernels including atomic and molecular orbitals, cusp corrections, Jastrow factor, and the necessary derivatives also to perform variational and structural optimization. QMCkl separates algorithmic development from hardware-specific tuning by combining human-readable reference implementations with performance-optimized kernels that produce identical numerical results. The library enables consistent, efficient, and reproducible simulations across different QMC codes and architectures, and achieves substantial speedups in the evaluation of the energy and its derivatives. Beyond QMC, QMCkl can accelerate deterministic quantum chemistry workflows and visualization tools, promoting cross-code interoperability and simplifying high-performance scientific software development.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2025

Optimizing excited states in quantum Monte Carlo: A reassessment of double excitations

Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods have proven to be highly accurate for computing excited states, but the choice of optimization strategies for multiple states remains an active topic of investigation. In this work, we revisit the calculation of double excitation energies in nitroxyl, glyoxal, tetrazine, and cyclopentadienone, exploring different objective functionals and their impact on the accuracy and robustness of QMC. A previous study for these systems employed a penalty functional to enforce orthogonality among the states, but the chosen prefactors did not strictly ensure convergence to the target states. Here, we confirm the reliability of previous results by comparing excitation energies obtained with different functionals and analyzing their consistency. Additionally, we investigate the performance of different functionals when starting from a pre-collapsed excited state, providing insight into their ability to recover the target wave functions.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2025

Reproducibility of fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo across diverse community codes: The case of water-methane dimer

Fixed-node diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (FN-DMC) is a widely-trusted many-body method for solving the Schr\"{o}dinger equation, known for its reliable predictions of material and molecular properties. Furthermore, its excellent scalability with system complexity and near-perfect utilization of computational power makes FN-DMC ideally positioned to leverage new advances in computing to address increasingly complex scientific problems. Even though the method is widely used as a computational gold standard, reproducibility across the numerous FN-DMC code implementations has yet to be demonstrated. This difficulty stems from the diverse array of DMC algorithms and trial wave functions, compounded by the method's inherent stochastic nature. This study represents a community-wide effort to assess the reproducibility of the method, affirming that: Yes, FN-DMC is reproducible (when handled with care). Using the water-methane dimer as the canonical test case, we compare results from eleven different FN-DMC codes and show that the approximations to treat the non-locality of pseudopotentials are the primary source of the discrepancies between them. In particular, we demonstrate that, for the same choice of determinantal component in the trial wave function, reliable and reproducible predictions can be achieved by employing the T-move (TM), the determinant locality approximation (DLA), or the determinant T-move (DTM) schemes, while the older locality approximation (LA) leads to considerable variability in results. These findings demonstrate that, with appropriate choices of algorithmic details, fixed-node DMC is reproducible across diverse community codes-highlighting the maturity and robustness of the method as a tool for open and reliable computational science.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Shifting sands of hardware and software in exascale quantum mechanical simulations

The era of exascale computing presents both exciting opportunities and unique challenges for quantum mechanical simulations. Although the transition from petaflops to exascale computing has been marked by a steady increase in computational power, it is accompanied by a shift towards heterogeneous architectures, with graphical processing units (GPUs) in particular gaining a dominant role. The exascale era, therefore, demands a fundamental shift in software development strategies. This Perspective examines the changing landscape of hardware and software for exascale computing, highlighting the limitations of traditional algorithms and software implementations in light of the increasing use of heterogeneous architectures in high-end systems. We discuss the challenges of adapting quantum chemistry software to these new architectures, including the fragmentation of the software stack, the need for more efficient algorithms (including reduced precision versions) tailored for GPUs, and the importance of developing standardized libraries and programming models.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Long-range configuration interaction with an ab initio short-range correction and an asymptotic lower bound

Short-range corrections to long-range selected configuration interaction calculations are derived from perturbation theory considerations and applied to harmonium (with two to six electrons for some low-lying states). No fitting to reference data is used, and the method is applicable to ground and excited states. The formulas derived are rigorous when the physical interaction is approached. In this regime, the second-order expression provides a lower bound to the long-range full configuration interaction energy. A long-range/short-range separation of the interaction between electrons at a distance of the order of one atomic unit provides total energies within chemical accuracy, and, for the systems studied, provide better results than short-range density functional approximations.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Selected Configuration Interaction for Resonances

Electronic resonances are metastable states that can decay by electron loss. They are ubiquitous across various fields of science, such as chemistry, physics, and biology. However, current theoretical and computational models for resonances cannot yet rival the level of accuracy achieved by bound-state methodologies. Here, we generalize selected configuration interaction (SCI) to treat resonances using the complex absorbing potential (CAP) technique. By modifying the selection procedure and the extrapolation protocol of standard SCI, the resulting CAP-SCI method yields resonance positions and widths of full configuration interaction quality. Initial results for the shape resonances of \ce{N2-} and \ce{CO-} reveal the important effect of high-order correlation, which shifts the values obtained with CAP-augmented equation-of-motion coupled-cluster with singles and doubles by more than \SI{0.1}{\eV}. The present CAP-SCI approach represents a cornerstone in the development of highly-accurate methodologies for resonances.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Improved modularity and new features in ipie: Toward even larger AFQMC calculations on CPUs and GPUs at zero and finite temperatures

ipie is a Python-based auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) package that has undergone substantial improvements since its initial release [J. Chem. Theory Comput., 2023, 19(1): 109-121]. This paper outlines the improved modularity and new capabilities implemented in ipie. We highlight the ease of incorporating different trial and walker types and the seamless integration of ipie with external libraries. We enable distributed Hamiltonian simulations of large systems that otherwise would not fit on single CPU node or GPU card. This development enabled us to compute the interaction energy of a benzene dimer with 84 electrons and 1512 orbitals with multi-GPUs. Using CUDA and cupy for NVIDIA GPUs, ipie supports GPU-accelerated multi-slater determinant trial wavefunctions [arXiv:2406.08314] to enable efficient and highly accurate simulations of large-scale systems. This allows for near-exact ground state energies of multi-reference clusters, [Cu$_2$O$_2$]$^{2+}$ and [Fe$_2$S$_2$(SCH$_3$)$_4$]$^{2-}$. We also describe implementations of free projection AFQMC, finite temperature AFQMC, AFQMC for electron--phonon systems, and automatic differentiation in AFQMC for calculating physical properties. These advancements position ipie as a leading platform for AFQMC research in quantum chemistry, facilitating more complex and ambitious computational method development and their applications.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

A modified expression for the Hamiltonian expectation value exploiting the short-range behavior of the wave function

The expectation value of the Hamiltonian using a model wave function is widely used to estimate the eigenvalues of electronic Hamiltonians. We explore here a modified formula for models based on long-range interaction. It scales differently the singlet and triplet component of the repulsion between electrons not present in the model (its short-range part). The scaling factors depend uniquely on the parameter used in defining the model interaction, and are constructed using only exact properties. We show results for the ground states and low-lying excited states of Harmonium with two to six electrons. We obtain important improvements for the estimation of the exact energy, not only over the model energy, but also over the expectation value of the Hamiltonian.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Stochastically accelerated perturbative triples correction in coupled cluster calculations

We introduce a novel algorithm that leverages stochastic sampling techniques to compute the perturbative triples correction in the coupled-cluster (CC) framework. By combining elements of randomness and determinism, our algorithm achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it allows for the calculation to be stopped at any time, providing an unbiased estimate, with a statistical error that goes to zero as the exact calculation is approached. We provide evidence that our semi-stochastic algorithm achieves substantial computational savings compared to traditional deterministic methods. Specifically, we demonstrate that a precision of 0.5 millihartree can be attained with only 10\% of the computational effort required by the full calculation. This work opens up new avenues for efficient and accurate computations, enabling investigations of complex molecular systems that were previously computationally prohibitive.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Compactification of Determinant Expansions via Transcorrelation

Although selected configuration interaction (SCI) algorithms can tackle much larger Hilbert spaces than the conventional full CI (FCI) method, the scaling of their computational cost with respect to the system size remains inherently exponential. Additionally, inaccuracies in describing the correlation hole at small interelectronic distances lead to the slow convergence of the electronic energy relative to the size of the one-electron basis set. To alleviate these effects, we show that the non-Hermitian, transcorrelated (TC) version of SCI significantly compactifies the determinant space, allowing to reach a given accuracy with a much smaller number of determinants. Furthermore, we note a significant acceleration in the convergence of the TC-SCI energy as the basis set size increases. The extent of this compression and the energy convergence rate are closely linked to the accuracy of the correlation factor used for the similarity transformation of the Coulombic Hamiltonian. Our systematic investigation of small molecular systems in increasingly large basis sets illustrates the magnitude of these effects.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Go Green: Selected Configuration Interaction as a More Sustainable Alternative for High Accuracy

Recently, a new distributed implementation of the full configuration interaction (FCI) method has been reported [Gao et al. J. Chem Theory Comput. 2024, 20, 1185]. Thanks to a hybrid parallelization scheme, the authors were able to compute the exact energy of propane (\ce{C3H8}) in the minimal basis STO-3G. This formidable task involves handling an active space of 26 electrons in 23 orbitals or a Hilbert space of \SI{1.3d12} determinants. This is, by far, the largest FCI calculation reported to date. Here, we illustrate how, from a general point of view, selected configuration interaction (SCI) can achieve microhartree accuracy at a fraction of the computational and memory cost, via a sparse exploration of the FCI space. The present SCI calculations are performed with the \textit{Configuration Interaction using a Perturbative Selection made Iteratively} (CIPSI) algorithm, as implemented in a determinant-driven way in the \textsc{quantum package} software. The present study reinforces the common wisdom that among the exponentially large number of determinants in the FCI space, only a tiny fraction of them significantly contribute to the energy. More importantly, it demonstrates the feasibility of achieving comparable accuracy using more reasonable and sustainable computational resources, hence reducing the ever-growing carbon footprint of computational chemistry.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Exploring the role of mean-field potentials and short-range wave function behavior in the adiabatic connection

In this article, we explore the construction of Hamiltonians with long-range interactions and their corrections using the short-range behavior of the wave function. A key aspect of our investigation is the examination of the one-particle potential, kept constant in our previous work, and the effects of its optimization on the adiabatic connection. Our methodology involves the use of a parameter-dependent potential dependent on a single parameter to facilitate practical computations. We analyze the energy errors and densities in a two-electron system (harmonium) under various conditions, employing different confinement potentials and interaction parameters. The study reveals that while the mean-field potential improves the expectation value of the physical Hamiltonian, it does not necessarily improve the energy of the system within the bounds of chemical accuracy. We also delve into the impact of density variations in adiabatic connections, challenging the common assumption that a mean field improves results. Our findings indicate that as long as energy errors remain within chemical accuracy, the mean field does not significantly outperform a bare potential. This observation is attributed to the effectiveness of corrections based on the short-range behavior of the wave function, a universal characteristic that diminishes the distinction between using a mean field or not.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

State-Specific Coupled-Cluster Methods for Excited States

We reexamine $Δ$CCSD, a state-specific coupled-cluster (CC) with single and double excitations (CCSD) approach that targets excited states through the utilization of non-Aufbau determinants. This methodology is particularly efficient when dealing with doubly excited states, a domain where the standard equation-of-motion CCSD (EOM-CCSD) formalism falls short. Our goal here is to evaluate the effectiveness of $Δ$CCSD when applied to other types of excited states, comparing its consistency and accuracy with EOM-CCSD. To this end, we report a benchmark on excitation energies computed with the $Δ$CCSD and EOM-CCSD methods, for a set of molecular excited-state energies that encompasses not only doubly excited states but also doublet-doublet transitions and (singlet and triplet) singly-excited states of closed-shell systems. In the latter case, we rely on a minimalist version of multireference CC known as the two-determinant CCSD method to compute the excited states. Our dataset, consisting of 276 excited states stemming from the \textsc{quest} database [Véril \textit{et al.}, \textit{WIREs Comput. Mol. Sci.} \textbf{2021}, 11, e1517], provides a significant base to draw general conclusions concerning the accuracy of $Δ$CCSD. Except for the doubly-excited states, we found that $Δ$CCSD underperforms EOM-CCSD. For doublet-doublet transitions, the difference between the mean absolute errors (MAEs) of the two methodologies (of \SI{0.10}{\eV} and \SI{0.07}{\eV}) is less pronounced than that obtained for singly-excited states of closed-shell systems (MAEs of \SI{0.15}{\eV} and \SI{0.08}{\eV}). This discrepancy is largely attributed to a greater number of excited states in the latter set exhibiting multiconfigurational characters, which are more challenging for $Δ$CCSD.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Transcorrelated selected configuration interaction in a bi-orthonormal basis and a cheap three-body correlation factor

In this work, we develop a mathematical framework for a Selected Configuration Interaction (SCI) algorithm within a bi-orthogonal basis for transcorrelated (TC) calculations. The bi-orthogonal basis used here serves as the equivalent of the standard Hartree Fock (HF) orbitals. However, within the context of TC, it leads to distinct orbitals for the left and right vectors. Our findings indicate that the use of such a bi-orthogonal basis allows for a proper definition of the frozen core approximation. In contrast, the use of HF orbitals results in bad error cancellations for ionization potentials and atomization energies (AE). Compared to HF orbitals, the optimized bi-orthogonal basis significantly reduces the positive part of the second-order energy (PT2), thereby facilitating the use of standard extrapolation techniques of hermitian SCI. While we did not observe a significant improvement in the convergence of the SCI algorithm, this is largely due to the use in the present work of a simple three-body correlation factor introduced in a recent study. This correlation factor, which depends only on atomic parameters, eliminates the need for re-optimization of the correlation factor for molecular systems, making its use straightforward and user-friendly. Despite the simplicity of this correlation factor, we were able to achieve accurate results on the AE of a series of 14 molecules in a triple-zeta basis. We also successfully broke a double bond until the full dissociation limit while maintaining the size consistency property. This work thus demonstrates the potential of the BiO-TC-SCI approach in handling complex molecular systems.

physics.chem-ph↗