Randolph Q. Hood

A first principles molecular dynamics simulation of the hydrated magnesium ion

Abstract First principles molecular dynamics has been used to investigate the solvation of Mg2+ in water. In agreement with experiment, we find that the first solvation shell around Mg2+ contains six water molecules in an octahedral arrangement. The electronic structure of first solvation shell water molecules has been examined with a localized orbital analysis. We find that water molecules tend to asymmetrically coordinate Mg2+ through one of the oxygen lone pair orbitals and that the first solvation shell dipole moments increase by 0.2 Debye relative to pure liquid water.

Neutral and charged excitations in carbon fullerenes from first-principles many-body theories

We investigate the accuracy of first-principles many-body theories at the nanoscale by comparing the low-energy excitations of the carbon fullerenes C(20), C(24), C(50), C(60), C(70), and C(80) with experiment. Properties are calculated via the GW-Bethe-Salpeter equation and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo methods. We critically compare these theories and assess their accuracy against available photoabsorption and photoelectron spectroscopy data. The first ionization potentials are consistently well reproduced and are similar for all the fullerenes and methods studied. The electron affinities and first triplet excitation energies show substantial method and geometry dependence. These results establish the validity of many-body theories as viable alternative to density-functional theory in describing electronic properties of confined carbon nanostructures. We find a correlation between energy gap and stability of fullerenes. We also find that the electron affinity of fullerenes is very high and size independent, which explains their tendency to form compounds with electron-donor cations.

DIFFUSION QUANTUM MONTE CARLO CALCULATIONS OF THE EXCITED STATES OF SILICON

The band structure of silicon is calculated at the G, X, andL wave vectors using diffusion quantum Monte Carlo ~DMC! methods. Excited states are formed by promoting an electron from the valence band into the conduction band. We obtain good agreement with experiment for states around the gap region, and demonstrate that the method works equally well for direct and indirect excitations, and that one can calculate many excited states at each wave vector. This work establishes the fixed-node DMC approach as an accurate method for calculating the energies of low-lying excitations in solids. @S0163-1829 ~98!11819-2#

Finite size errors in quantum many-body simulations of extended systems

Further developments are introduced in the theory of finite-size errors in quantum many-body simulations of extended systems using periodic boundary conditions. We show that our recently introduced model periodic Coulomb interaction @A. J. Williamson et al., Phys. Rev. B 55, R4851 ~1997!# can be applied consistently to all Coulomb interactions in the system. The model periodic Coulomb interaction greatly reduces the finite-size errors in quantum many-body simulations. We illustrate the practical application of our techniques with Hartree-Fock and variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations for ground- and excited-state calculations. We demonstrate that the finite-size effects in electron promotion and electron addition/subtraction excitation energy calculations are very similar. @S0163-1829~99!07303-8#

Two-dimensional limit of exchange-correlation energy functional approximations

We investigate the behavior of three-dimensional (3D) exchange-correlation energy functional approximations of density functional theory in anisotropic systems with two-dimensional (2D) character. Using two simple models, quasi-2D electron gas and two-electron quantum dot, we show a {\it fundamental limitation} of the local density approximation (LDA), and its semi-local extensions, generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and meta-GGA (MGGA), the most widely used forms of which are worse than the LDA in the strong 2D limit. The origin of these shortcomings is in the inability of the local (LDA) and semi-local (GGA/MGGA) approximations to describe systems with 2D character in which the nature of the exchange-correlation hole is very nonlocal. Nonlocal functionals provide an alternative approach, and explicitly the average density approximation (ADA) is shown to be remarkably accurate for the quasi-2D electron gas system. Our study is not only relevant for understanding of the functionals but also practical applications to semiconductor quantum structures and materials such as graphite and metal surfaces. We also comment on the implication of our findings to the practical device simulations based on the (semi-)local density functional method.

Diffusion quantum Monte Carlo study of the equation of state and point defects in aluminum

The many-body diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) method with twist-averaged boundary conditions is used to calculate the ground-state equation of state and the energetics of point defects in fcc aluminum using supercells up to 1331 atoms. The DMC equilibrium lattice constant differs from experiment by 0.008 , or 0.2%, while the cohesive energy using DMC with backflow wave functions with improved nodal surfaces differs by 27 meV. DMC-calculated defect formation and migration energies agree with available experimental data, except for the nearest-neighbor divacancy, which is found to be energetically unstable, in agreement with previous density functional theory (DFT) calculations. DMC and DFT calculations of vacancy defects are in reasonably close agreement. Self-interstitial formation energies have larger differences between DMC and DFT, of up to 0.33eV, at the tetrahedral site. We also computed formation energies of helium interstitial defects where energies differed by up to 0.34 eV, also at the tetrahedral site. The close agreement with available experiments demonstrates that DMC can be used as a predictive method to obtain benchmark energetics of defects in metals.

Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the one-body density matrix and excitation energies of silicon

Quantum Monte Carlo~QMC! techniques are used to calculate the one-body density matrix and excitation energies for the valence electrons of bulk silicon. The one-body density matrix and energies are obtained from a Slater-Jastrow wave function with a determinant of local-density approximation ~LDA ! orbitals. The QMC density matrix evaluated in a basis of LDA orbitals is strongly diagonally dominant. The natural orbitals obtained by diagonalizing the QMC density matrix resemble the LDA orbitals very closely. Replacing the determinant of LDA orbitals in the wave function by a determinant of natural orbitals makes no significant difference to the quality of the wave function’s nodal surface, leaving the diffusion Monte Carlo energy unchanged. The extended Koopmans’s theorem for correlated wave functions is used to calculate excitation energies for silicon, which are in reasonable agreement with the available experimental data. A diagonal approximation to the theorem, evaluated in the basis of LDA orbitals, works quite well for both the quasihole and quasielectron states. We have found that this approximation has an advantageous scaling with system size, allowing more efficient studies of larger systems. @S0163-1829 ~98!05224-2#

Systematic reduction of sign errors in many-body calculations of atoms and molecules

The self-healing diffusion Monte Carlo algorithm (SHDMC) is shown to be an accurate and robust method for calculating the ground state of atoms and molecules. By direct comparison with accurate configuration interaction results for the oxygen atom, we show that SHDMC converges systematically towards the ground-state wave function. We present results for the challenging N2 molecule, where the binding energies obtained via both energy minimization and SHDMC are near chemical accuracy (1  kcal/mol). Moreover, we demonstrate that SHDMC is robust enough to find the nodal surface for systems at least as large as C20 starting from random coefficients. SHDMC is a linear-scaling method, in the degrees of freedom of the nodes, that systematically reduces the fermion sign problem.

Comparative study of density-functional theories of the exchange-correlation hole and energy in silicon

We present a detailed study of the exchange-correlation hole and exchange-correlation energy per particle in the Si crystal as calculated by the variational Monte Carlo method and predicted by various density-functional models. Nonlocal density-averaging methods prove to be successful in correcting severe errors in the local-density approximation (LDA) at low densities where the density changes dramatically over the correlation length of the LDA hole, but fail to provide systematic improvements at higher densities where the effects of density inhomogeneity are more subtle. Exchange and correlation considered separately show a sensitivity to the nonlocal semiconductor-crystal environment, particularly within the Si bond, which is not predicted by the nonlocal approaches based on density averaging. The exchange hole is well described by a bonding-orbital picture, while the correlation hole has a significant component due to the polarization of the nearby bonds, which partially screens out the anisotropy in the exchange hole.

Prospects for release-node quantum Monte Carlo

We perform release-node quantum Monte Carlo simulations on the first row diatomic molecules in order to assess how accurately their ground-state energies can be obtained. An analysis of the fermion-boson energy difference is shown to be strongly dependent on the nuclear charge, Z, which in turn determines the growth of variance of the release-node energy. It is possible to use maximum entropy analysis to extrapolate to ground-state energies only for the low Z elements. For the higher Z dimers beyond boron, the error growth is too large to allow accurate data for long enough imaginary times. Within the limit of our statistics we were able to estimate, in atomic units, the ground-state energy of Li(2) (-14.9947(1)), Be(2) (-29.3367(7)), and B(2)(-49.410(2)).