A quantum Monte Carlo calculation of the ground state energy of the hydrogen molecule

Abstract

Abstract Since the wavefunction for the ground state of the hydrogen molecule has no nodes, its energy can be determined in QMC without node location error. This paper reports such calculations for the full four-body (two-electron, two-proton) problem to obtain the energy without the use of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation or any other adiabatic approximations. The calculations were carried out with diffusion QMC and with Green’s function QMC. Importance sampling was incorporated into each of the calculations. For the diffusion calculations, extrapolation of energies obtained at several different time-step sizes was required. For the Green’s function calculations there was no time-step error, and sign changes for walkers were avoided by use of a potential energy offset and a minor approximation to eliminate positive potential energies. The energies so determined were not exact but had extremely small systematic errors. The large differences in electron and proton masses led to extensive computation requirements due to the slow equilibration and serial correlation induced by the heavier protons. The calculations were executed on one of the first massively parallel computers, a Thinking Machines CM-2 with 65,536 processors. Frequent communication among the processors was required to balance the number of walkers treated in each.