arXiv subjects

Pierre-François Loos

Publications and source records attributed to Pierre-François Loos.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Influence of Pseudopotentials on Excitation Energies From Selected Configuration Interaction and Diffusion Monte Carlo

Due to their diverse nature, the faithful description of excited states within electronic structure theory methods remains one of the grand challenges of modern theoretical chemistry. Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods have been applied very successfully to ground state properties but still remain generally less effective than other non-stochastic methods for electronically excited states. Nonetheless, we have recently reported accurate excitation energies for small organic molecules at the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo (FN-DMC) within a Jastrow-free QMC protocol relying on a deterministic and systematic construction of nodal surfaces using the selected configuration interaction (sCI) algorithm known as CIPSI (Configuration Interaction using a Perturbative Selection made Iteratively). Albeit highly accurate, these all-electron calculations are computationally expensive due to the presence of core electrons. One very popular approach to remove these chemically-inert electrons from the QMC simulation is to introduce pseudopotentials (also known as effective core potentials). Taking the water molecule as an example, we investigate the influence of Burkatzki-Filippi-Dolg (BFD) pseudopotentials and their associated basis sets on vertical excitation energies obtained with sCI and FN-DMC methods. Although these pseudopotentials are known to be relatively safe for ground state properties, we evidence that special care may be required if one strives for highly accurate vertical transition energies. Indeed, comparing all-electron and valence-only calculations, we show that using pseudopotentials with the associated basis sets can induce differences of the order of 0.05 eV on the excitation energies. Fortunately, a reasonable estimate of this shift can be estimated at the sCI level.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2019

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.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2019

Evaluating 0-0 Energies with Theoretical Tools: a Short Review

For a given electronic excited state, the 0-0 energy ($T_0$ or $T_{00}$) is the simplest property allowing straightforward and physically-sound comparisons between theory and (accurate) experiment. However, the computation of 0-0 energies with \emph{ab initio} approaches requires determining both the structure and the vibrational frequencies of the excited state, which limits the quality of the theoretical models that can be considered in practice. This explains why only a rather limited, yet constantly increasing, number of works have been devoted to the determination of this property. In this contribution, we review these efforts with a focus on benchmark studies carried out for both gas phase and solvated compounds. Over the years, not only as the size of the molecules increased, but the refinement of the theoretical tools has followed the same trend. Though the results obtained in these benchmarks significantly depend on both the details of the protocol and the nature of the excited states, one can now roughly estimate, in the case of valence transitions, the overall accuracy of theoretical schemes as follows: $1$ eV for CIS, $0.2$--$0.3$ eV for CIS(D), $0.2$--$0.4$ eV for TD-DFT when one employs hybrid functionals, $0.1$--$0.2$ eV for ADC(2) and CC2, and $0.04$ eV for CC3, the latter approach being the only one delivering chemical accuracy on a near-systematic basis.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2019

Complex Adiabatic Connection: a Hidden Non-Hermitian Path from Ground to Excited States

Processes related to electronically excited states are central in many areas of science, however accurately determining excited-state energies remains a major challenge in theoretical chemistry. Recently, higher energy stationary states of non-linear methods have themselves been proposed as approximations to excited states, although the general understanding of the nature of these solutions remains surprisingly limited. In this Letter, we present an entirely novel approach for exploring and obtaining excited stationary states by exploiting the properties of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. Our key idea centres on performing analytic continuations of conventional quantum chemistry methods. Considering Hartree--Fock theory as an example, we analytically continue the electron-electron interaction to expose a hidden connectivity of multiple solutions across the complex plane, revealing a close resemblance between Coulson--Fischer points and non-Hermitian degeneracies. Finally, we demonstrate how a ground-state wave function can be morphed naturally into an excited-state wave function by constructing a well-defined complex adiabatic connection.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Reference Energies for Double Excitations

Excited states exhibiting double excitation character are notoriously difficult to model using conventional single-reference methods, such as adiabatic time-dependent density-functional theory (TD-DFT) or equation-of-motion coupled cluster (EOM-CC). In the present work, we provide accurate reference excitation energies for transitions involving a substantial amount of double excitation using a series of increasingly large diffuse-containing atomic basis sets. Our set gathers 20 vertical transitions from 14 small- and medium-size molecule. Depending on the size of the molecule, selected configuration interaction (sCI) and/or multiconfigurational calculations are performed in order to obtain reliable estimates of the vertical transition energies. In addition, coupled cluster approaches including at least contributions from iterative triples are assessed. Our results clearly evidence that the error in CC methods is intimately related to the amount of double excitation character of the transition. For "pure" double excitations (i.e. for transitions which do not mix with single excitations), the error in CC3 can easily reach 1 eV, while it goes down to few tenths of an eV for more common transitions (like in \emph{trans}-butadiene) involving a significant amount of singles. As expected, CC approaches including quadruples yield highly accurate results for any type of transitions. The quality of the excitation energies obtained with multiconfigurational methods is harder to predict. We have found that the overall accuracy of these methods is highly dependent of both the system and the selected active space. The inclusion of the $σ$ and $σ^*$ orbitals in the active space, even for transitions involving mostly $π$ and $π^*$ orbitals, is mandatory in order to reach high accuracy. A theoretical best estimate (TBE) is reported for each transition.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Chemically Accurate 0-0 Energies with not-so-Accurate Excited State Geometries

Using a series of increasingly refined wavefunction methods able to tackle electronic excited states, namely ADC(2), CC2, CCSD, CCSDR(3) and CC3, we investigate the interplay between geometries and 0-0 energies. We show that, due to a strong and nearly systematic error cancelation between the vertical transition and geometrical reorganization energies, CC2 and CCSD structures can be used to obtain chemically-accurate 0-0 energies, though the underlying geometries are rather far from the reference ones and would deliver significant errors for many chemical and physical properties. This indicates that obtaining 0-0 energies matching experiment does not demonstrate the quality of the geometrical parameters. In contrast, accurate computation of vertical excitation energies is mandatory in order to reach chemical accuracy. By determining CC3 total energies on CCSD structures, we model a large set of compounds (including radicals) and electronic transitions (including singlet-triplet excitations) and successfully reach chemical accuracy in a near systematic way. Indeed, for this particular set, our protocol delivers a mean absolute error as small as $0.032$ eV, chemical accuracy (error smaller than $1$ kcal.mol$^{-1}$ or $0.043$ eV) being obtained in 80\%\ of the cases. In only three cases the error exceeds $0.15$ eV which is of the order of the typical error provided by TD-DFT or second-order wavefunction methods for this particular property. The present composite protocol is therefore very effective despite the fact that the geometries may not be considered as very accurate.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Unphysical Discontinuities in GW Methods

We report unphysical irregularities and discontinuities in some key experimentally-measurable quantities computed within the GW approximation of many-body perturbation theory applied to molecular systems. In particular, we show that the solution obtained with partially self-consistent GW schemes depends on the algorithm one uses to solve self-consistently the quasi-particle (QP) equation. The main observation of the present study is that each branch of the self-energy is associated with a distinct QP solution, and that each switch between solutions implies a significant discontinuity in the quasiparticle energy as a function of the internuclear distance. Moreover, we clearly observe "ripple" effects, i.e., a discontinuity in one of the QP energies induces (smaller) discontinuities in the other QP energies. Going from one branch to another implies a transfer of weight between two solutions of the QP equation. The case of occupied, virtual and frontier orbitals are separately discussed on distinct diatomics. In particular, we show that multisolution behavior in frontier orbitals is more likely if the HOMO-LUMO gap is small.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Selected configuration interaction dressed by perturbation

Selected configuration interaction (sCI) methods including second-order perturbative corrections provide near full CI (FCI) quality energies with only a small fraction of the determinants of the FCI space. Here, we introduce both a state-specific and a multi-state sCI method based on the CIPSI (Configuration Interaction using a Perturbative Selection made Iteratively) algorithm. The present method revises the reference (internal) space under the effect of its interaction with the outer space via the construction of an effective Hamiltonian, following the shifted-Bk philosophy of Davidson and coworkers. In particular, the multi-state algorithm removes the storage bottleneck of the effective Hamiltonian via a low-rank factorization of the dressing matrix.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

A Mountaineering Strategy to Excited States: Highly-Accurate Reference Energies and Benchmarks

Striving to define very accurate vertical transition energies, we perform both high-level coupled cluster (CC) calculations (up to CCSDTQP) and selected configuration interaction (sCI) calculations (up to several millions of determinants) for 18 small compounds. By systematically increasing the order of the CC expansion, the number of determinants in the CI expansion as well as the size of the one-electron basis set, we have been able to reach near full CI (FCI) quality transition energies. These calculations are carried out on CC3/aug-cc-pVTZ geometries, using a series of increasingly large atomic basis sets systematically including diffuse functions. In this way, we define a list of 110 transition energies for states of various characters to be used as references for further calculations. Benchmark transition energies are provided at the aug-pVTZ level as well as with additional basis set corrections, in order to obtain results close to the complete basis set limit. These reference data are used to benchmark a series of twelve excited-state wave function methods accounting for double and triple contributions, namely ADC(2), ADC(3), CIS(D), CIS(D$_\infty$), CC2, STEOM-CCSD, CCSD, CCSDR(3), CCSDT-3, CC3, CCSDT and CCSDTQ. It turns out that CCSDTQ yields a negligible difference with the extrapolated CI values with a mean absolute error as small as $0.01$ eV, whereas the coupled cluster approaches including iterative triples are also very accurate (mean absolute error of $0.03$ eV). Consequently, CCSDT-3 and CC3 can be used to define reliable benchmarks. This observation does not hold for ADC(3) that delivers quite large errors for this set of small compounds, with a clear tendency to overcorrect its second-order version, ADC(2). Finally, we discuss the possibility to use basis set extrapolation approaches so as to tackle more easily larger compounds.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Excitation energies from diffusion Monte Carlo using selected Configuration Interaction nodes

Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) is a stochastic method which has been particularly successful for ground-state electronic structure calculations but mostly unexplored for the computation of excited-state energies. Here, we show that, within a Jastrow-free QMC protocol relying on a deterministic and systematic construction of nodal surfaces using selected configuration interaction (sCI) expansions, one is able to obtain accurate excitation energies at the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo (FN-DMC) level. This evidences that the fixed-node errors in the ground and excited states obtained with sCI wave functions cancel out to a large extent. Our procedure is tested on two small organic molecules (water and formaldehyde) for which we report all-electron FN-DMC calculations. For both the singlet and triplet manifolds, accurate vertical excitation energies are obtained with relatively compact multideterminant expansions built with small (typically double-$ζ$) basis sets.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2018

Green functions and self-consistency: insights from the spherium model

We report an exhaustive study of the performance of different variants of Green function methods for the spherium model in which two electrons are confined to the surface of a sphere and interact via a genuine long-range Coulomb operator. We show that the spherium model provides a unique paradigm to study electronic correlation effects from the weakly correlated regime to the strongly correlated regime, since the mathematics are simple while the physics is rich. We compare perturbative GW, partially self-consistent GW and second-order Green function (GF2) methods for the computation of ionization potentials, electron affinities, energy gaps, correlation energies as well as singlet and triplet neutral excitations by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE). We discuss the problem of self-screening in GW and show that it can be partially solved with a second-order screened exchange correction (SOSEX). We find that, in general, self-consistency deteriorates the results with respect to those obtained within perturbative approaches with a Hartree-Fock starting point. Finally, we unveil an important problem of partial self-consistency in GW: in the weakly correlated regime, it can produce artificial discontinuities in the self-energy caused by satellite resonances with large weights.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

Deterministic construction of nodal surfaces within quantum Monte Carlo: the case of FeS

In diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) methods, the nodes (or zeroes) of the trial wave function dictate the magnitude of the fixed-node (FN) error. Within standard DMC implementations, they emanate from short multideterminant expansions, \textit{stochastically} optimized in the presence of a Jastrow factor. Here, following a recent proposal, we follow an alternative route by considering the nodes of selected configuration interaction (sCI) expansions built with the CIPSI (Configuration Interaction using a Perturbative Selection made Iteratively) algorithm. In contrast to standard implementations, these nodes can be \textit{systematically} and \textit{deterministically} improved by increasing the size of the sCI expansion. The present methodology is used to investigate the properties of the transition metal sulfide molecule FeS. This apparently simple molecule has been shown to be particularly challenging for electronic structure theory methods due to the proximity of two low-energy quintet electronic states of different spatial symmetry. In particular, we show that, at the triple-zeta basis set level, all sCI results --- including those extrapolated at the full CI (FCI) limit --- disagree with experiment, yielding an electronic ground state of $^{5}Σ^+$ symmetry. Performing FN-DMC simulation with sCI nodes, we show that the correct $^{5}Δ$ ground state is obtained if sufficiently large expansions are used. Moreover, we show that one can systematically get accurate potential energy surfaces and reproduce the experimental dissociation energy as well as other spectroscopic constants.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

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.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

Three- and four-electron integrals involving Gaussian geminals: fundamental integrals, upper bounds and recurrence relations

We report the three main ingredients to calculate three- and four-electron integrals over Gaussian basis functions involving Gaussian geminal operators: fundamental integrals, upper bounds, and recurrence relations. In particular, we consider the three- and four-electron integrals that may arise in explicitly-correlated F12 methods. A straightforward method to obtain the fundamental integrals is given. We derive vertical, transfer and horizontal recurrence relations to build up angular momentum over the centers. Strong, simple and scaling-consistent upper bounds are also reported. This latest ingredient allows to compute only the $\order{N^2}$ significant three- and four-electron integrals, avoiding the computation of the very large number of negligible integrals.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

Recurrence relations for four-electron integrals over Gaussian basis functions

In the spirit of the Head-Gordon-Pople algorithm, we report vertical, transfer and horizontal recurrence relations for the efficient and accurate computation of four-electron integrals over Gaussian basis functions. Our recursive approach is a generalization of our algorithm for three-electron integrals [J.~Chem.~Theory Comput.~12, 1735 (2016)]. The RRs derived in the present study can be applied to a general class of multiplicative four-electron operators. In particular, we consider various types of four-electron integrals that may arise in explicitly-correlated F12 methods.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

Exchange functionals based on finite uniform electron gases

We show how one can construct \alert{a simple} exchange functional by extending the well-know local-density approximation (LDA) to finite uniform electron gases. This new generalized local-density approximation (GLDA) functional uses only two quantities: the electron density $ρ$ and the curvature of the Fermi hole $α$. This alternative "rung 2" functional can be easily coupled with generalized-gradient approximation (GGA) functionals to form a new family of "rung 3" meta-GGA (MGGA) functionals that we have named factorizable MGGAs (FMGGAs). Comparisons are made with various LDA, GGA and MGGA functionals for atoms and molecules.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

Molecular electronic structure in one-dimensional Coulomb systems

Following two recent papers [Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2015, \textbf{17}, 3196; Mol. Phys. 2015, \textbf{113}, 1843], we perform a larger-scale study of chemical structure in one dimension (1D). We identify a wide, and occasionally surprising, variety of stable 1D compounds (from diatomics to tetra-atomics) as well as a small collection of stable polymeric structures. We define the exclusion potential, a 1D analogue of the electrostatic potential, and show that it can be used to rationalise the nature of bonding within molecules. This allows us to construct a small set of simple rules which can predict whether a putative 1D molecule should be stable.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2016

Excited-State Wigner Crystals in One Dimension

Wigner crystals (WC) are electronic phases peculiar to low-density systems, particularly in the uniform electron gas. Since its introduction in the early twentieth century, this model has remained essential to many aspects of electronic structure theory and condensed-matter physics. Although the (lowest-energy) ground-state WC (GSWC) has been thoroughly studied, the properties of excited-state WCs (ESWCs) are basically unknown. To bridge this gap, we present a well-defined procedure to obtain an entire family of ESWCs in a one-dimensional electron gas using a symmetry-broken mean-field approach. While the GSWC is a commensurate crystal (i.e.~the number of density maxima equals the number of electrons), these ESWCs are incommensurate crystals exhibiting more or less maxima. Interestingly, they are lower in energy than the (uniform) Fermi fluid state. For some of these ESWCs we have found asymmetrical band gaps, which would lead to anisotropic conductivity. These properties are associated to unusual characteristics in their electronic structure.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗