On the ground state calculation of a many-body system using a self-consistent basis and quasi-Monte Carlo: an application to water hexamer.

Given a quantum many-body system, the Self-Consistent Phonons (SCP) method provides an optimal harmonic approximation by minimizing the free energy. In particular, the SCP estimate for the vibrational ground state (zero temperature) appears to be surprisingly accurate. We explore the possibility of going beyond the SCP approximation by considering the system Hamiltonian evaluated in the harmonic eigenbasis of the SCP Hamiltonian. It appears that the SCP ground state is already uncoupled to all singly- and doubly-excited basis functions. So, in order to improve the SCP result at least triply-excited states must be included, which then reduces the error in the ground state estimate substantially. For a multidimensional system two numerical challenges arise, namely, evaluation of the potential energy matrix elements in the harmonic basis, and handling and diagonalizing the resulting Hamiltonian matrix, whose size grows rapidly with the dimensionality of the system. Using the example of water hexamer we demonstrate that such calculation is feasible, i.e., constructing and diagonalizing the Hamiltonian matrix in a triply-excited SCP basis, without any additional assumptions or approximations. Our results indicate particularly that the ground state energy differences between different isomers (e.g., cage and prism) of water hexamer are already quite accurate within the SCP approximation.

Mapping the phase diagram for neon to a quantum Lennard-Jones fluid using Gibbs ensemble simulations.

In order to address the issue of whether neon liquid in coexistence with its gas phase can be mapped to a quantum Lennard-Jones (LJ) fluid, we perform a series of simulations using Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo for a range of de Boer quantum parameters Λ=ℏ/(σ√(mε)). The quantum effects are incorporated by implementing the variational gaussian wavepacket method, which provides an efficient numerical framework for estimating the quantum density at thermal equilibrium. The computed data for the LJ liquid is used to produce its phase diagram as a function of the quantum parameter, 0.065 ≤ Λ ≤ 0.11. These data are then used to fit the experimental phase diagram for neon liquid. The resulting parameters, ε = 35.68 ± 0.03 K and σ = 2.7616 ± 0.0005 Å (Λ = 0.0940), of the LJ pair potential are optimized to best represent liquid neon in coexistence with its gas phase for a range of physically relevant temperatures. This multi-temperature approach towards fitting and assessing a pair-potential is much more consistent than merely fitting a single data point, such as a melting temperature or a second virial coefficient.

Self-consistent phonons revisited. II. A general and efficient method for computing free energies and vibrational spectra of molecules and clusters.

The self-consistent phonons (SCP) method provides a consistent way to include anharmonic effects when treating a many-body quantum system at thermal equilibrium. The system is then described by an effective temperature-dependent harmonic Hamiltonian, which can be used to estimate the system's properties, such as its free energy or its vibrational spectrum. The numerical bottleneck of the method is the evaluation of Gaussian averages of the potential energy and its derivatives. Several algorithmic ideas/tricks are introduced to reduce the cost of such integration by orders of magnitude, e.g., relative to that of the previous implementation of the SCP approach by Calvo et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 133, 074303 (2010)]. One such algorithmic improvement is the replacement of standard Monte Carlo integration by quasi-Monte Carlo integration utilizing low-discrepancy sequences. The performance of the method is demonstrated on the calculation of vibrational frequencies of pyrene. It is then applied to compute the free energies of five isomers of water hexamer using the WHBB potential of Bowman and co-workers [J. Chem. Phys. 134, 094509 (2011)]. The present results predict the hexamer prism being thermodynamically most stable, with the free energy of the hexamer cage being about 0.2 kcal mol(-1) higher at all temperatures below T = 200 K.

Self-consistent phonons revisited. I. The role of thermal versus quantum fluctuations on structural transitions in large Lennard-Jones clusters.

The theory of self-consistent phonons (SCP) was originally developed to address the anharmonic effects in condensed matter systems. The method seeks a harmonic, temperature-dependent Hamiltonian that provides the "best fit" for the physical Hamiltonian, the "best fit" being defined as the one that optimizes the Helmholtz free energy at a fixed temperature. The present developments provide a scalable O(N) unified framework that accounts for anharmonic effects in a many-body system, when it is probed by either thermal (ℏ → 0) or quantum fluctuations (T → 0). In these important limits, the solution of the nonlinear SCP equations can be reached in a manner that requires only the multiplication of 3N × 3N matrices, with no need of diagonalization. For short range potentials, such as Lennard-Jones, the Hessian, and other related matrices are highly sparse, so that the scaling of the matrix multiplications can be reduced from O(N(3)) to ~O(N). We investigate the role of quantum effects by continuously varying the de-Boer quantum delocalization parameter Λ and report the N-Λ (T = 0), and also the classical N-T (Λ = 0) phase diagrams for sizes up to N ~ 10(4). Our results demonstrate that the harmonic approximation becomes inadequate already for such weakly quantum systems as neon clusters, or for classical systems much below the melting temperatures.

A fast variational Gaussian wavepacket method: size-induced structural transitions in large neon clusters.

The variational Gaussian wavepacket (VGW) approximation provides an alternative to path integral Monte Carlo for the computation of thermodynamic properties of many-body systems at thermal equilibrium. It provides a direct access to the thermal density matrix and is particularly efficient for Monte Carlo approaches, as for an N-body system it operates in a non-inflated 3N-dimensional configuration space. Here, we greatly accelerate the VGW method by retaining only the relevant short-range correlations in the (otherwise full) 3N × 3N Gaussian width matrix without sacrificing the accuracy of the fully coupled VGW method. This results in the reduction of the original O(N(3)) scaling to O(N(2)). The fast-VGW method is then applied to quantum Lennard-Jones clusters with sizes up to N = 6500 atoms. Following Doye and Calvo [JCP 116, 8307 (2002)] we study the competition between the icosahedral and decahedral structural motifs in Ne(N) clusters as a function of N.

Thermal Gaussian molecular dynamics for quantum dynamics simulations of many-body systems: application to liquid para-hydrogen.

A new method, here called thermal Gaussian molecular dynamics (TGMD), for simulating the dynamics of quantum many-body systems has recently been introduced [I. Georgescu and V. A. Mandelshtam, Phys. Rev. B 82, 094305 (2010)]. As in the centroid molecular dynamics (CMD), in TGMD the N-body quantum system is mapped to an N-body classical system. The associated both effective Hamiltonian and effective force are computed within the variational Gaussian wave-packet approximation. The TGMD is exact for the high-temperature limit, accurate for short times, and preserves the quantum canonical distribution. For a harmonic potential and any form of operator Â, it provides exact time correlation functions C(AB)(t) at least for the case of B, a linear combination of the position, x, and momentum, p, operators. While conceptually similar to CMD and other quantum molecular dynamics approaches, the great advantage of TGMD is its computational efficiency. We introduce the many-body implementation and demonstrate it on the benchmark problem of calculating the velocity time auto-correlation function for liquid para-hydrogen, using a system of up to N = 2592 particles.

Attosecond resolved charging of ions in a rare-gas cluster.

A scheme to probe dissipative multielectron motion in time is introduced. In this context attosecond probing enables one to obtain information which is lost at later times and cannot be retrieved by conventional methods in the energy domain due to the incoherent nature of the dynamics. As a specific example we will trace the transient charging of ions in a rare-gas cluster during a strong femtosecond vacuum-ultraviolet pulse by means of delayed attosecond pulses.