arXiv subjects

Sandro Sorella

Publications and source records attributed to Sandro Sorella.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Load-Balanced Diffusion Monte Carlo Method with Lattice Regularization

Ab initio quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) is a stochastic approach for solving the many-body Schr\"odinger equation without resorting to one-body approximations. QMC algorithms are readily parallelizable via ensembles of $N_w$ walkers, making them well suited to large-scale high-performance computing. Among the QMC techniques, Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) is widely regarded as the most reliable, since it provides the projection onto the ground state of a given Hamiltonian under the fixed-node approximation. One practical realization of DMC is the Lattice Regularized Diffusion Monte Carlo (LRDMC) method, which discretizes the Hamiltonian within the Green's Function Monte Carlo framework. DMC methods - including LRDMC - employ the so-called branching technique to stabilize walker weights and populations. At the branching step, walkers must be synchronized globally; any imbalance in per-walker workload can leave CPU or GPU cores idle, thereby degrading overall hardware utilization. The conventional LRDMC algorithm intrinsically suffers from such load imbalance, which grows as $\log(N_w)$, rendering it less efficient on modern parallel architectures. In this work, we present an LRDMC algorithm that inherently addresses the load imbalance issue and achieves significantly improved weak-scaling parallel efficiency. Using the binding energy calculation of a water-methane complex as a test case, we demonstrated that the conventional and load-balanced LRDMC algorithms yield consistent results. Furthermore, by utilizing the Leonardo supercomputer equipped with NVIDIA A100 GPUs, we demonstrated that the load-balanced LRDMC algorithm can maintain extremely high parallel efficiency ($\sim$98\%) up to 512 GPUs (corresponding to $N_{\rm w}= 51200$), together with a speedup of $\times~1.24$ if directly compared with the conventional LRDMC algorithm with the same number of walkers.

physics.chem-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

Beyond single-reference fixed-node approximation in ab initio Diffusion Monte Carlo using antisymmetrized geminal power applied to systems with hundreds of electrons

Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) is an exact technique to project out the ground state (GS) of a Hamiltonian. Since the GS is always bosonic, in fermionic systems the projection needs to be carried out while imposing anti-symmetric constraints, which is a nondeterministic polynomial hard problem. In practice, therefore, the application of DMC on electronic structure problems is made by employing the fixed-node (FN) approximation, consisting of performing DMC with the constraint of having a fixed predefined nodal surface. How do we get the nodal surface? The typical approach, applied in systems having up to hundreds, or even thousands of electrons, is to obtain the nodal surface from a preliminary mean-field approach (typically, a density functional theory calculation) used to obtain a single Slater determinant. This is known as {\emph{single reference}}. In this paper, we propose a new approach, applicable to systems as large as the C$_{60}$ fullerene, which improves the nodes by going beyond the single reference. In practice, we employ an implicitly multireference ansatz (Antisymmetrized Geminal power wavefunction constraint with molecular orbitals), initialized on the preliminary mean-field approach, which is relaxed by optimizing a few parameters of the wave function determining the nodal surface by minimizing the FN-DMC energy. We highlight the improvements of the proposed approach over the standard single reference method on several examples and, where feasible, the computational gain over the standard multireference ansatz, which makes the methods applicable to large systems. We also show that physical properties relying on relative energies, such as binding energies, are affordable and reliable within the proposed scheme.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

TurboGenius: Python suite for high-throughput calculations of ab initio quantum Monte Carlo methods

TurboGenius is an open-source Python package designed to fully control ab initio quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) jobs using a Python script, which allows one to perform high-throughput calculations combined with TurboRVB [K. Nakano et al. J. Phys. Chem. 152, 204121 (2020)]. This paper provides an overview of the TurboGenius package and showcases several results obtained in a high-throughput mode. For the purpose of performing high-throughput calculations with TurboGenius, we implemented another open-source Python package, TurboWorkflows, that enables one to construct simple workflows using TurboGenius. We demonstrate its effectiveness by performing (1) validations of density functional theory (DFT) and QMC drivers as implemented in the TurboRVB package and (2) benchmarks of Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations for several data sets. For (1), we checked inter-package consistencies between TurboRVB and other established quantum chemistry packages. By doing so, we confirmed that DFT energies obtained by PySCF are consistent with those obtained by TurboRVB within the local density approximation (LDA), and that Hartree-Fock (HF) energies obtained by PySCF and Quantum Package are consistent with variational Monte Carlo energies obtained by TurboRVB with the HF wavefunctions. These validation tests constitute a further reliability check of the TurboRVB package. For (2), we benchmarked atomization energies of the Gaussian-2 set, binding energies of the S22, A24, and SCAI sets, and equilibrium lattice parameters of 12 cubic crystals using DMC calculations. We found that, for all compounds analyzed here, the DMC calculations with the LDA nodal surface give satisfactory results, i.e., consistent either with high-level computational or with experimental reference values.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

A Jastrow wave function for the spin-1 Heisenberg chain: the string order revealed by the mapping to the classical Coulomb gas

We show that a two-body Jastrow wave function is able to capture the ground-state properties of the $S=1$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain with the single-ion anisotropy term, in both the topological and trivial phases. Here, the optimized Jastrow pseudo potential assumes a very simple form in Fourier space, i.e., $v_{q} \approx 1/q^2$, which is able to give rise to a finite string-order parameter in the topological regime. The results are analysed by using an exact mapping from the quantum expectation values over the variational state to the classical partition function of the one-dimensional Coulomb gas of particles with charge $q=\pm 1$. Here, two phases are present at low temperatures: the first one is a diluted gas of dipoles (bound states of particles with opposite charges), which are randomly oriented (describing the trivial phase); the other one is a dense liquid of dipoles, which are aligned thanks to the residual dipole-dipole interactions (describing the topological phase, with the finite string order being related to the dipole alignment). Our results provide an insightful interpretation of the ground-state nature of the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2023

TREXIO: A File Format and Library for Quantum Chemistry

TREXIO is an open-source file format and library developed for the storage and manipulation of data produced by quantum chemistry calculations. It is designed with the goal of providing a reliable and efficient method of storing and exchanging wave function parameters and matrix elements, making it an important tool for researchers in the field of quantum chemistry. In this work, we present an overview of the TREXIO file format and library. The library consists of a front-end implemented in the C programming language and two different back-ends: a text back-end and a binary back-end utilizing the HDF5 library which enables fast read and write operations. It is compatible with a variety of platforms and has interfaces for the Fortran, Python, and OCaml programming languages. In addition, a suite of tools has been developed to facilitate the use of the TREXIO format and library, including converters for popular quantum chemistry codes and utilities for validating and manipulating data stored in TREXIO files. The simplicity, versatility, and ease of use of TREXIO make it a valuable resource for researchers working with quantum chemistry data.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Towards chemical accuracy using the Jastrow correlated antisymmetrized geminal power ansatz

Herein, we report accurate atomization energy calculations for 55 molecules in the Gaussian-2 (G2) set using lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo (LRDMC). We compare the Jastrow-Slater determinant ansatz with a more flexible JsAGPs (Jastrow correlated antisymmetrized geminal power with singlet correlation) ansatz. AGPs is built from pairing functions, which explicitly include pairwise correlations among electrons and hence, this ansatz is expected to be more efficient in recovering the correlation energy. The AGPs wave functions are first optimized at the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) level, which includes both the Jastrow factor and the nodal surface optimization. This is followed by the LRDMC projection of the ansatz. Remarkably, for many molecules, the LRDMC atomization energies obtained using the JsAGPs ansatz reach chemical accuracy ($\sim$1 kcal/mol) and for most other molecules, the atomization energies are accurate within $\sim$5 kcal/mol. We obtained a mean absolute deviation of 1.6 kcal/mol with JsAGPs and 3.2 kcal/mol with JDFT (Jastrow factor + Slater determinant with DFT orbitals) ansatz. This work shows the effectiveness of the flexible AGPs ansatz for atomization energy calculations and electronic structure simulations in general.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Variational Benchmarks for Quantum Many-Body Problems

The continued development of computational approaches to many-body ground-state problems in physics and chemistry calls for a consistent way to assess its overall progress. In this work, we introduce a metric of variational accuracy, the V-score, obtained from the variational energy and its variance. We provide an extensive curated dataset of variational calculations of many-body quantum systems, identifying cases where state-of-the-art numerical approaches show limited accuracy, and future algorithms or computational platforms, such as quantum computing, could provide improved accuracy. The V-score can be used as a metric to assess the progress of quantum variational methods toward a quantum advantage for ground-state problems, especially in regimes where classical verifiability is impossible.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Principal deuterium Hugoniot via Quantum Monte Carlo and $\Delta$-learning

We present a study of the principal deuterium Hugoniot for pressures up to $150$ GPa, using Machine Learning potentials (MLPs) trained with Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) energies, forces and pressures. In particular, we adopted a recently proposed workflow based on the combination of Gaussian kernel regression and $\Delta$-learning. By fully taking advantage of this method, we explicitly considered finite-temperature electrons in the dynamics, whose effects are highly relevant for temperatures above $10$ kK. The Hugoniot curve obtained by our MLPs shows a good agreement with the most recent experiments, particularly in the region below 60 GPa. At larger pressures, our Hugoniot curve is slightly more compressible than the one yielded by experiments, whose uncertainties generally increase, however, with pressure. Our work demonstrates that QMC can be successfully combined with $\Delta$-learning to deploy reliable MLPs for complex extended systems across different thermodynamic conditions, by keeping the QMC precision at the computational cost of a mean-field calculation.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

The phase diagram of the Hubbard model by Variational Auxiliary Field quantum Monte Carlo

A systematically improvable wave function is proposed for the numerical solution of strongly correlated systems. With a stochastic optimization method, based on the auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo technique, an effective temperature Teff is defined, probing the distance of the ground state properties of the model in the thermodynamic limit from the ones of the proposed correlated mean-field ansatz. In this way their uncertainties from the unbiased zero temperature limit may be estimated by simple and stable extrapolations well before the so called sign problem gets prohibitive. At finite Teff the convergence of the energy to the thermodynamic limit is indeed shown to be possible in the Hubbard model already for relatively small square lattices with linear dimension L ~10, thanks to appropriate averages over several twisted boundary conditions. Within the estimated energy accuracy of the proposed variational ansatz, two clear phases are identified, as the energy is lowered by spontaneously breaking some symmetries satisfied by the Hubbard Hamiltonian: a) a stripe phase where both spin and translation symmetries are broken, and b) a strong coupling d-wave superconducting phase when the particle number is not conserved and global U(1) symmetry is broken. On the other hand the symmetric phase is stable in a wide region at large doping and small coupling.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

Quantum phase diagram of high-pressure hydrogen

The interplay between electron correlation and nuclear quantum effects makes our understanding of elemental hydrogen a formidable challenge. Here, we present the phase diagram of hydrogen and deuterium at low temperatures and high-pressure ($P > 300$ GPa by accounting for highly accurate electronic and nuclear enthalpies. We evaluated internal electronic energies by diffusion quantum Monte Carlo, while nuclear quantum motion and anharmonicity have been included by the stochastic self-consistent harmonic approximation. Our results show that the long-sought atomic metallic hydrogen, predicted to host room-temperature superconductivity, forms at $577\pm 10$ GPa ($640\pm 14$ GPa in deuterium). Indeed, anharmonicity pushes the stability of this phase towards pressures much larger than previous theoretical estimates or attained experimental values. Before atomization, molecular hydrogen transforms from a conductive phase III to another metallic structure that is still molecular (phase VI) at $422\pm 40$ GPa ($442\pm30$ GPa in deuterium). We predict clear-cut signatures in optical spectroscopy and DC conductivity that can be used experimentally to distinguish between the two structural transitions. According to our findings, the experimental evidence of metallic hydrogen has so far been limited to molecular phases.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

High pressure hydrogen by machine learning and quantum Monte Carlo

We have developed a technique combining the accuracy of quantum Monte Carlo in describing the electron correlation with the efficiency of a Machine Learning Potential (MLP). We use kernel regression in combination with SOAP (Smooth Overlap of Atomic Position) features, implemented here in a very efficient way. The key ingredients are: i) a sparsification technique, based on farthest point sampling, ensuring generality and transferability of our MLPs and ii) the so called $\Delta$-learning, allowing a small training data set, a fundamental property for highly accurate but computationally demanding calculations, such as the ones based on quantum Monte Carlo. As the first application we present a benchmark study of the liquid-liquid transition of high-pressure hydrogen and show the quality of our MLP, by emphasizing the importance of high accuracy for this very debated subject, where experiments are difficult in the lab, and theory is still far from being conclusive.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

QMC study of the chiral Heisenberg Gross-Neveu universality class

We investigate a quantum criticality of an antiferromagnetic phase transition in the Hubbard model on a square lattice with a $d$-wave pairing field by large-scale auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Since the $d$-wave pairing filed induces Dirac cones in the non-interacting single-particle spectrum, the quantum criticality should correspond to the chiral Heisenberg universality class in terms of the Gross-Neveu theory, which is the same as those expected in the Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice, despite the unit cells being different (e.g., they contain one and two sites, respectively). We show that both the two phase transitions, expected to occur on the square and on the honeycomb lattices, indeed have the same quantum criticality. We also argue that details of the models, i.e., the way of counting the total number $N$ of fermion components and the anisotropy of the Dirac cones, do not change the critical exponents.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

Space-warp coordinate transformation for efficient ionic force calculations in quantum Monte Carlo

Ab-initio quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are a state-of-the-art computational approach to obtaining highly accurate many-body wave functions. Although QMC methods are widely used in physics and chemistry to compute ground-state energies, calculation of atomic forces is still under technical/algorithmic development. Very recently, force evaluation has started to become of paramount importance for the generation of machine-learning force-field potentials. Nevertheless, there is no consensus regarding whether an efficient algorithm is available for the QMC force evaluation, namely one that scales well with the number of electrons and the atomic numbers. In this study, we benchmark the accuracy of all-electron variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and lattice-regularized diffusion Monte Carlo (LRDMC) forces for various mono- and heteronuclear dimers. The VMC and LRDMC forces were calculated with and without the so-called space-warp coordinate transformation (SWCT) and appropriate regularization techniques to remove the infinite variance problem. The LRDMC forces were computed with the Reynolds (RE) and variational-drift (VD) approximations. The potential energy surfaces obtained from the LRDMC energies give equilibrium bond lengths ($r_{\rm eq}$) and harmonic frequencies ($ω$) very close to the experimental values for all dimers, improving the corresponding VMC results. The LRDMC forces improve the VMC forces, implying that it is worth computing the DMC forces beyond VMC in spite of the higher computational cost. We find that the ratio of computational costs between QMC energy and forces scales as $Z^{\sim 2.5}$ without the SWCT. In contrast, the application of the SWCT makes the ratio {\it independent} of $Z$. As such, the accessible QMC system size is not affected by the evaluation of ionic forces but governed by the same scaling as the total energy one.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2021

The two-dimensional $t$-$t^{\prime}$ Holstein model

The competition and interplay between charge-density wave and superconductivity have become a central subject for quasi-2D compounds. Some of these materials, such as the transition-metal dichalcogenides, exhibit strong electron-phonon coupling, an interaction that may favor both phases, depending on the external parameters, such as hydrostatic pressure. In view of this, here we analyze the single-band $t$-$t^{\prime}$ Holstein model in the square lattice, adding a next-nearest neighbor hopping $t^{\prime}$ in order to play the role of the external pressure. To this end, we perform unbiased quantum Monte Carlo simulations with an efficient inversion sampling technique appropriately devised for this model. Such a methodology drastically reduces the autocorrelation time, and increases the efficiency of the Monte Carlo approach. By investigating the charge-charge correlation functions, we obtain the behavior of the critical temperature as a function of $t^{\prime}$, and from compressibility analysis, we show that a first-order metal-to-insulator phase transition occurs. We also provide a low-temperature phase diagram for the model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

Atomic forces by quantum Monte Carlo: application to phonon dispersion calculation

We report the first successful application of the {\it ab initio} quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) framework to a phonon dispersion calculation. A full phonon dispersion of diamond is successfully calculated at the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) level, based on the frozen-phonon technique. The VMC-phonon dispersion is in good agreement with the experimental results, giving renormalized harmonic optical frequencies very close to the experimental values, by significantly improving upon density functional theory (DFT) in the generalized gradient approximation. Key to success for the QMC approach is the statistical error reduction in atomic force evaluation. We show that this can be achieved by using well conditioned atomic basis sets, by explicitly removing the basis-set redundancy, which reduces the statistical error of forces by up to two orders of magnitude. This leads to affordable and accurate QMC-phonons calculations, up to $10^{4}$ times more efficient than previous attempts, and paves the way to new applications, particularly in correlated materials, where phonons have been poorly reproduced so far.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

Dirac electrons in the square lattice Hubbard model with a $d$-wave pairing field: chiral Heisenberg universality class revisited

We numerically investigate the quantum criticality of the chiral Heisenberg universality class with the total number of fermion components $N$=8 in terms of the Gross-Neveu theory. Auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo simulations are performed for the square lattice Hubbard model in the presence of a $d$-wave pairing field, inducing Dirac cones in the single particle spectrum. This property makes the model particularly interesting because it turns out to belong to the same universality class of the Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice, that is the canonical model for graphene, despite the unit cells being apparently different (e.g. they contain one and two sites, respectively). We indeed show that the two phase transitions, expected to occur on the square and on the honeycomb lattices, have the same quantum criticality. We also argue that details of the models, i.e., the way of counting $N$ and the anisotropy of the Dirac cones, do not change the critical exponents. The present estimates of the exponents for the $N$=8 chiral Heisenberg universality class are $ν$=1.05(5), $η_ϕ$=0.75(4), and $η_ψ$=0.23(4), which are compared with the previous numerical estimations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

The nature of the chemical bond in the dicarbon molecule

The molecular dissociation energy has often been explained and discussed in terms of singlet bonds, formed by bounded pairs of valence electrons. In this work we use a highly correlated resonating valence bond ansatz, providing a consistent paradigm for the chemical bond, where spin fluctuations are shown to play a crucial role. Spin fluctuations are known to be important in magnetic systems and correspond to the zero point motion of the spin waves emerging from a magnetic broken symmetry state. Recently, in order to explain the excitation spectrum of the carbon dimer, an unusual quadruple bond has been proposed. Within our ansatz, a satisfactory description of the carbon dimer is determined by the magnetic interaction of two Carbon atoms with antiferromagnetically ordered S = 1 magnetic moments. This is a first step that, thanks to the highly scalable and efficient quantum Monte Carlo technique, may open the way for understanding challenging complex systems containing atoms with large spins (e.g. transition metals).

physics.chem-ph↗