Quantum Monte Carlo methods for the solution of the Schroedinger equation for molecular systems

QMCPACK is an open source quantum Monte Carlo package for ab-initio electronic structure calculations. It supports calculations of metallic and insulating solids, molecules, atoms, and some model Hamiltonians. Implemented real space quantum Monte Carlo algorithms include variational, diffusion, and reptation Monte Carlo. QMCPACK uses Slater-Jastrow type trial wave functions in conjunction with a sophisticated optimizer capable of optimizing tens of thousands of parameters. Th...

Practical challenges in simulating quantum systems on classical computers have been widely recognized in the quantum physics and quantum chemistry communities over the past century. Although many approximation methods have been introduced, the complexity of quantum mechanics remains hard to appease. The advent of quantum computation brings new pathways to navigate this challenging complexity landscape. By manipulating quantum states of matter and taking advantage of their uni...

The history of the development of Monte Carlo methods to solve the many-body problem in quantum mechanics is presented. The survey starts with the early attempts with the first available computers just after the war and extends until the years 80s with the celebrated calculation of the electron gas by Ceperley and Alder. Usage is made of an interview of David Ceperley by the author.

We propose a quantum Monte Carlo approach to solve the ground state many-body Schrodinger equation for the electronic ground state. The method combines optimization from variational Monte Carlo and propagation from auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo, in a way that significantly alleviates the sign problem. In application to molecular systems, we obtain highly accurate results for configurations dominated by either dynamic or static electronic correlation.

Monte Carlo techniques have been widely employed in statistical physics as well as in quantum theory in the Lagrangian formulation. However, in some areas of application to quantum theories computational progress has been slow. Here we present a recently developed approach: the Monte Carlo Hamiltonian method, designed to overcome the difficulties of the conventional approach.

We describe a new open-source Python-based package for high accuracy correlated electron calculations using quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) in real space: PyQMC. PyQMC implements modern versions of QMC algorithms in an accessible format, enabling algorithmic development and easy implementation of complex workflows. Tight integration with the PySCF environment allows for simple comparison between QMC calculations and other many-body wave function techniques, as well as access to hig...

We perform quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations to determine minimum energy pathways of simple chemical reactions, and compare the computed geometries and reaction barriers with those obtained with density functional theory (DFT) and quantum chemistry methods. We find that QMC performs in general significantly better than DFT, being also able to treat cases in which DFT is inaccurate or even unable to locate the transition state. Since the wave function form employed here i...

Quantum Monte Carlo methods are accurate and promising many body techniques for electronic structure calculations which, in the last years, are encountering a growing interest thanks to their favorable scaling with the system size and their efficient parallelization, particularly suited for the modern high performance computing facilities. The ansatz of the wave function and its variational flexibility are crucial points for both the accurate description of molecular properti...

In this paper we present the Uppsala Quantum Chemistry package (UQUANTCHEM), a new and versatile computational platform with capabilities ranging from simple Hartree-Fock calculations to state of the art First principles Extended Lagrangian Born Oppenheimer Molecular Dynamics (XL- BOMD) and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC). The UQUANTCHEM package is distributed under the general public license and can be directly downloaded from the code web-site. Together with a presentat...

In this work we develop tools that enable the study of non-adiabatic effects with variational and diffusion Monte Carlo methods. We introduce a highly accurate wave function ansatz for electron-ion systems that can involve a combination of both fixed and quantum ions. We explicitly calculate the ground state energies of H$_{2}$, LiH, H$_{2}$O and FHF$^{-}$ using fixed-node quantum Monte Carlo with wave function nodes that explicitly depend on the ion positions. The obtained e...