Power Laws Used to Extrapolate the Coupled Cluster Correlation Energy to the Thermodynamic Limit

Highly Accurate Electronic Structure of Metallic Solids from Coupled-Cluster Theory with Nonperturbative Triple Excitations

Coupled-cluster theory with single, double, and perturbative triple excitations (CCSD(T))-often considered the "gold standard" of main-group quantum chemistry-is inapplicable to three-dimensional metals due to an infrared divergence, preventing its application to many important problems in materials science. We study the full, nonperturbative inclusion of triple excitations (CCSDT) and propose a new, iterative method, which we call ring-CCSDT, that resums the essential triple excitations with the same N^{7} run-time scaling as CCSD(T). CCSDT and ring-CCSDT are used to calculate the correlation energy of the uniform electron gas at metallic densities and the structural properties of solid lithium. Inclusion of connected triple excitations is shown to be essential to achieving high accuracy. We also investigate semiempirical CC methods based on spin-component scaling and the distinguishable cluster approximation and find that they enhance the accuracy of their parent ab initio methods.

How the Exchange Energy Can Affect the Power Laws Used to Extrapolate the Coupled Cluster Correlation Energy to the Thermodynamic Limit

Finite size error is commonly removed from coupled cluster theory calculations by N-1 extrapolations over correlation energy calculations of different system sizes (N), where the N-1 scaling comes from the total energy rather than the correlation energy. However, previous studies in the quantum Monte Carlo community suggest an exchange-energy-like power law of N-2/3 should also be present in the correlation energy when using the conventional Coulomb interaction. The rationale for this is that the total energy goes as N-1 and the exchange energy goes as N-2/3; thus, the correlation energy should be a combination of these two power laws. Further, in coupled cluster theory, these power laws are related to the low G scaling of the transition structure factor, S(G), which is a property of the coupled cluster wave function calculated from the amplitudes. We show here that data from coupled cluster doubles calculations on the uniform electron gas fit a function with a low G behavior of S(G) ∼ G. The prefactor for this linear term is derived from the exchange energy to be consistent with an N-2/3 power law at large N. Incorporating the exchange structure factor into the transition structure factor results in a combined structure factor of S(G) ∼ G2, consistent with an N-1 scaling of the exchange-correlation energy. We then look for the presence of an N-2/3 power law in the energy. To do so, we first develop a plane-wave cutoff scheme with less noise than the traditional basis set used for the uniform electron gas. Then, we collect data from a wide range of electron numbers and densities to systematically test five methods using N-1 scaling, N-2/3 scaling, or combinations of both scaling behaviors. We find that power laws that incorporate both N-1 and N-2/3 scaling perform better than either alone, especially when the prefactor for N-2/3 scaling can be found from exchange energy calculations.

Staggered Mesh Method for Correlation Energy Calculations of Solids: Second-Order Møller-Plesset Perturbation Theory

The calculation of the MP2 correlation energy for extended systems can be viewed as a multidimensional integral in the thermodynamic limit, and the standard method for evaluating the MP2 energy can be viewed as a trapezoidal quadrature scheme. We demonstrate that the existing analysis neglects certain contributions due to the nonsmoothness of the integrand and may significantly underestimate finite-size errors. We propose a new staggered mesh method, which uses two staggered Monkhorst-Pack meshes for occupied and virtual orbitals, respectively, to compute the MP2 energy. The staggered mesh method circumvents a significant error source in the standard method in which certain quadrature nodes are always placed on points where the integrand is discontinuous. One significant advantage of the proposed method is that there are no tunable parameters, and the additional numerical effort needed can be negligible compared to the standard MP2 calculation. Numerical results indicate that the staggered mesh method can be particularly advantageous for quasi-1D systems as well as quasi-2D and 3D systems with certain symmetries.