Excited States with Selected Configuration Interaction-Quantum Monte Carlo: Chemically Accurate Excitation Energies and Geometries

Monika Dash, Jonas Feldt, Saverio Moroni*, Anthony Scemama*, Claudia Filippi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

41 Citations (Scopus)
147 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We employ quantum Monte Carlo to obtain chemically accurate vertical and adiabatic excitation energies, and equilibrium excited-state structures for the small, yet challenging, formaldehyde and thioformaldehyde molecules. A key ingredient is a robust protocol to obtain balanced ground- and excited-state Jastrow-Slater wave functions at a given geometry, and to maintain such a balanced description as we relax the structure in the excited state. We use determinantal components generated via a selected configuration interaction scheme which targets the same second-order perturbation energy correction for all states of interest at different geometries, and fully optimize all variational parameters in the resultant Jastrow-Slater wave functions. Importantly, the excitation energies as well as the structural parameters in the ground and excited states are converged with very compact wave functions comprising few thousand determinants in a minimally augmented double-ζ basis set. These results are obtained already at the variational Monte Carlo level, the more accurate diffusion Monte Carlo method yielding only a small improvement in the adiabatic excitation energies. We find that matching Jastrow-Slater wave functions with similar variances can yield excitation energies compatible with our best estimates; however, the variance-matching procedure requires somewhat larger determinantal expansions to achieve the same accuracy, and it is less straightforward to adapt during structural optimization in the excited state.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4896-4906
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of chemical theory and computation
Volume15
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Sept 2019

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