Accelerating Core-Level GW Calculations by Combining the Contour Deformation Approach with the Analytic Continuation of W

Long-range Corrected Density Functional Theory Including a Two-Gaussian Hartree-Fock Operator for High Accuracy Core-excitation Energy Calculations of Both the Second- and Third-Row Atoms (LC2gau-core-BOP)

In the previous work, LCgau-core-BOP, which includes the short-range interelectronic Gaussian attenuating Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange to the long-range HF exchange, showed high accuracy core-excitation energies from 1s orbitals of the second-row atoms (1s → π*, 1s → σ*, 1s → n*, and 1s → Rydberg), but underestimates the core-excitation energies from 1s orbitals of the third-row atoms. To improve this, we added one more Gaussian attenuating HF exchange to LCgau-core-BOP. We named it LC2gau-core-BOP, which achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.6 and 0.3 eV for core excitation energies of the second- and third-row atoms of the tested small molecules, respectively. We found that the inclusion of the short-range interelectronic HF exchange at a distance ranging from 0.2 to 0.6 a.u. contributes to the increase of performances on 1s orbital energy calculations of the second-row atoms, while the inclusion of more short-range interelectronic HF exchange at a distance ranging from 0 to 0.2 a.u. does to the increase of performance on 1s orbital energy calculations of the third-row atoms. It is notable that all of these improvements were accomplished using flexible Gaussian attenuating HF exchange inclusion. LC2gau-core-BOP shows deviations of less than 0.8 eV from experimental values for all of the core-excitation energies of the tested medium-size molecules consisting of thymine, oxazole, glycine, and dibenzothiophene sulfone. Moreover, by optimizing one parameter of the OP correlation functional, LC2gau-core-BOP provides atomization energies over the G3 test set with an accuracy comparable to that of B3LYP.

Chemical Potentials and the One-Electron Hamiltonian of the Second-Order Perturbation Theory from the Functional Derivative Approach

We develop a functional derivative approach to calculate the chemical potentials of second-order perturbation theory (MP2). In the functional derivative approach, the correlation part of the MP2 chemical potential, which is the derivative of the MP2 correlation energy with respect to the occupation number of frontier orbitals, is obtained from the chain rule via the noninteracting Green's function. First, the MP2 correlation energy is expressed in terms of the noninteracting Green's function, and its functional derivative to the noninteracting Green's function is the second-order self-energy. Then, the derivative of the noninteracting Green's function to the occupation number is obtained by including the orbital relaxation effect. We show that the MP2 chemical potentials obtained from the functional derivative approach agree with that obtained from the finite difference approach. The one-electron Hamiltonian, defined as the derivative of the MP2 energy with respect to the one particle density matrix, is also derived using the functional derivative approach, which can be used in the self-consistent calculations of MP2 and double-hybrid density functionals. The developed functional derivative approach is promising for calculating the chemical potentials and the one-electron Hamiltonian of approximate functionals and many-body perturbation approaches dependent explicitly on the noninteracting Green's function.

Reference Energies for Valence Ionizations and Satellite Transitions

Upon ionization of an atom or a molecule, another electron (or more) can be simultaneously excited. These concurrently generated states are called "satellites" (or shakeup transitions) as they appear in ionization spectra as higher-energy peaks with weaker intensity and larger width than the main peaks associated with single-particle ionizations. Satellites, which correspond to electronically excited states of the cationic species, are notoriously challenging to model using conventional single-reference methods due to their high excitation degree compared to the neutral reference state. This work reports 42 satellite transition energies and 58 valence ionization potentials (IPs) of full configuration interaction quality computed in small molecular systems. Following the protocol developed for the quest database [Véril, M.; Scemama, A.; Caffarel, M.; Lipparini, F.; Boggio-Pasqua, M.; Jacquemin, D.; and Loos, P.-F. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev.: Comput. Mol. Sci. 2021, 11, e1517], these reference energies are computed using the configuration interaction using a perturbative selection made iteratively (CIPSI) method. In addition, the accuracy of the well-known coupled-cluster (CC) hierarchy (CC2, CCSD, CC3, CCSDT, CC4, and CCSDTQ) is gauged against these new accurate references. The performances of various approximations based on many-body Green's functions (GW, GF2, and T-matrix) for IPs are also analyzed. Their limitations in correctly modeling satellite transitions are discussed.

AB-G0W0: A practical G0W0 method without frequency integration based on an auxiliary boson expansion

Common G0W0 implementations rely on numerical or analytical frequency integration to determine the G0W0 self-energy, which results in a variety of practical complications. Recently, we have demonstrated an exact connection between the G0W0 approximation and equation-of-motion quantum chemistry approaches [J. Tölle and G. Kin-Lic Chan, J. Chem. Phys. 158, 124123 (2023)]. Based on this connection, we propose a new method to determine G0W0 quasiparticle energies, which completely avoids frequency integration and its associated problems. To achieve this, we make use of an auxiliary boson (AB) expansion. We name the new approach AB-G0W0 and demonstrate its practical applicability in a range of molecular problems.

Benchmarking the accuracy of the separable resolution of the identity approach for correlated methods in the numeric atom-centered orbitals framework

Four-center two-electron Coulomb integrals routinely appear in electronic structure algorithms. The resolution-of-the-identity (RI) is a popular technique to reduce the computational cost for the numerical evaluation of these integrals in localized basis-sets codes. Recently, Duchemin and Blase proposed a separable RI scheme [J. Chem. Phys. 150, 174120 (2019)], which preserves the accuracy of the standard global RI method with the Coulomb metric and permits the formulation of cubic-scaling random phase approximation (RPA) and GW approaches. Here, we present the implementation of a separable RI scheme within an all-electron numeric atom-centered orbital framework. We present comprehensive benchmark results using the Thiel and the GW100 test set. Our benchmarks include atomization energies from Hartree-Fock, second-order Møller-Plesset (MP2), coupled-cluster singles and doubles, RPA, and renormalized second-order perturbation theory, as well as quasiparticle energies from GW. We found that the separable RI approach reproduces RI-free HF calculations within 9 meV and MP2 calculations within 1 meV. We have confirmed that the separable RI error is independent of the system size by including disordered carbon clusters up to 116 atoms in our benchmarks.