H3 + as a five-body problem described with explicitly correlated Gaussian basis sets

Quantum Definition of Molecular Structure

Molecular structure, a key concept of chemistry, has remained elusive from the perspective of all-particle quantum mechanics, despite many efforts. Viewing molecular structure as a manifestation of strong statistical correlation between nuclear positions, we propose a practical method based on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and unsupervised machine learning. Application to the D3+ molecule unambiguously shows that it possesses an equilateral triangular structure. These results provide a major step forward in our understanding of the molecular structure from fundamental quantum principles.

Symmetry-Projected Nuclear-Electronic Hartree-Fock: Eliminating Rotational Energy Contamination

We present a symmetry projection technique for enforcing rotational and parity symmetries in nuclear-electronic Hartree-Fock wave functions, which treat electrons and nuclei on equal footing. The molecular Hamiltonian obeys rotational and parity inversion symmetries, which are, however, broken by expanding in Gaussian basis sets that are fixed in space. We generate a trial wave function with the correct symmetry properties by projecting the wave function onto representations of the three-dimensional rotation group, i.e., the special orthogonal group in three dimensions SO(3). As a consequence, the wave function becomes an eigenfunction of the angular momentum operator which (i) eliminates the contamination of the ground-state wave function by highly excited rotational states arising from the broken rotational symmetry and (ii) enables the targeting of specific rotational states of the molecule. We demonstrate the efficiency of the symmetry projection technique by calculating the energies of the low-lying rotational states of the H2 and H3+ molecules.

Deformed explicitly correlated Gaussians

Deformed explicitly correlated Gaussian (DECG) basis functions are introduced, and their matrix elements are calculated. All matrix elements can be calculated analytically in a closed form, except the Coulomb one, which has to be approximated by a Gaussian expansion. The DECG basis functions can be used to solve problems with nonspherical potentials. One example of such potential is the dipole self-interaction term in the Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian. Examples are presented showing the accuracy and necessity of deformed Gaussian basis functions to accurately solve light-matter coupled systems in cavity QED.

Lower Bounds for Nonrelativistic Atomic Energies

A recently developed lower bound theory for Coulombic problems (E. Pollak, R. Martinazzo, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2021, 17, 1535) is further developed and applied to the highly accurate calculation of the ground-state energy of two- (He, Li⁺, and H^-) and three- (Li) electron atoms. The method has been implemented with explicitly correlated many-particle basis sets of Gaussian type, on the basis of the highly accurate (Ritz) upper bounds they can provide with relatively small numbers of functions. The use of explicitly correlated Gaussians is developed further for computing the variances, and the necessary modifications are here discussed. The computed lower bounds are of submilli-Hartree (parts per million relative) precision and for Li represent the best lower bounds ever obtained. Although not yet as accurate as the corresponding (Ritz) upper bounds, the computed bounds are orders of magnitude tighter than those obtained with other lower bound methods, thereby demonstrating that the proposed method is viable for lower bound calculations in quantum chemistry applications. Among several aspects, the optimization of the wave function is shown to play a key role for both the optimal solution of the lower bound problem and the internal check of the theory.

Nuclear-electronic all-particle density matrix renormalization group

We introduce the Nuclear-Electronic All-Particle Density Matrix Renormalization Group (NEAP-DMRG) method for solving the time-independent Schrödinger equation simultaneously for electrons and other quantum species. In contrast to the already existing multicomponent approaches, in this work, we construct from the outset a multi-reference trial wave function with stochastically optimized non-orthogonal Gaussian orbitals. By iterative refining of the Gaussians' positions and widths, we obtain a compact multi-reference expansion for the multicomponent wave function. We extend the DMRG algorithm to multicomponent wave functions to take into account inter- and intra-species correlation effects. The efficient parameterization of the total wave function as a matrix product state allows NEAP-DMRG to accurately approximate the full configuration interaction energies of molecular systems with more than three nuclei and 12 particles in total, which is currently a major challenge for other multicomponent approaches. We present the NEAP-DMRG results for two few-body systems, i.e., H₂ and H₃ ⁺, and one larger system, namely, BH₃.