An efficient method to evaluate energy variances for extrapolation methods

Abstract

The energy variance extrapolation method consists of relating the approximate energies in many-body calculations to the corresponding energy variances and inferring eigenvalues by extrapolating to zero variance. The method needs a fast evaluation of the energy variances. For many-body methods that expand the nuclear wavefunctions in terms of deformed Slater determinants, the best available method for the evaluation of energy variances scales with the sixth power of the number of single-particle states. We propose a new method which depends on the number of single-particle orbits and the number of particles rather than the number of single-particle states. We discuss as an example the case of 4He using the chiral N3LO interaction in a basis consisting up to 184 single-particle states.