Studying Electron Correlation with Quantum Monte Carlo Methods

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 物理研究所 === 95 === The methods for including the many-body interaction are important in studying many-particle problems. A popular approach is to map the problem to a single particle picture and introduce a mean field potential. Alternatively, the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, w...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cheng-Rong Hsing, 邢正蓉
Other Authors: 李定國
Format: Others
Language:en_US
Published: 2006
Online Access:http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/57208469108264832488
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Summary:博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 物理研究所 === 95 === The methods for including the many-body interaction are important in studying many-particle problems. A popular approach is to map the problem to a single particle picture and introduce a mean field potential. Alternatively, the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, which treat the correlation more direct and accurate, are a powerful computational tool for studying an interacting many-body system. The focus of this thesis is variational Monte Carlo and diffusion Monte Carlo methods. In this thesis, two works were presented : • We use the combination of the coupling-constant integration procedure and the variational Quantum Monte Carlo method to study the exchange-correlation (XC) interaction in small molecules: Si2, C2H2, C2H4, and C2H6. We report the calculated XC energy density, a central quantity in density functional theory, as deduced from the interaction between the electron and its XC hole integrated over the interaction strength. Comparing these“exact”XC energy densities with results using the local-density approximation (LDA), one can analyze the errors in this widely-used approximation. Since the XC energy is an integrated quantity, error cancellation among the XC energy density in different regions is possible. Indeed we find a general error cancellation between the high-density and low-density regions. Moreover, the error distribution of the exchange contribution is out of phase with the error distribution of the correlation contribution. Similar to what is found for bulk silicon and an isolated silicon atom, the spatial variation of the errors of the LDA XC energy density in these molecules largely follows the sign and shape of the Laplacian of the electron density. Some noticeable deviations are found in Si2 in which the Laplacian peaks between the atoms, while the LDA error peaks in the regions “behind” atoms where a good portion of the charge density originates from an occupied 1sigma_u antibonding orbital. Our results indicate that, although the functional form could be quite complex, an XC energy functional containing the Laplacian of the energy is a promising possibility for improving LDA. • We use VMC method to study the excitation energies of trans-polyacetylene. QMC have been used for the calculation of excited-states of molecules and bulk silicon, but little is known about applying it to conjugated polymers. trans-polyacetylene is the simplest one and has been studied by many theoretical and experimental works. In theoretical calculation for trans-polyacetylene, GW results are accurate in the direct band gap and Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE), including the electron-hole interaction, is accurate for the singlet optically active state 11Bu. However, the excitation energy for optically inactive state 21Ag is higher than the experimental value, resulting a optically active state is lower than the optically inactive state. In our VMC calculation, the direct band gap for the isolated polymer is higher than the GW value for 0.76 eV. For the previous calculation of polythiophene by GW method, the direct band gap for a single chain was also higher than the bulk calculation for 1.1ev. Therefore, our VMC result in single chain should be consistent with their study. The VMC excitation energies are also higher than the experimental or GW-BSE values, but the binding energy of optically active state is comparable to their results. This may be due to the error cancellation of our calculation. In general, the quality of our VMC trial wave functions dominate our results and the nodal structure of the wave function is also important.