Benchmarking the pseudopotential and fixed-node approximations in diffusion Monte Carlo calculations of molecules and solids

Abstract

We performed diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations of the spectroscopic properties of a large set of molecules, assessing the effect of different approximations. In systems containing elements with large atomic numbers, we show that the errors associated with the use of nonlocal mean-field-based pseudopotentials in DMC calculations can be significant and may surpass the fixed-node error. We suggest practical guidelines for reducing these pseudopotential errors, which allow us to obtain DMC-computed spectroscopic parameters of molecules and equation of state properties of solids in excellent agreement with experiment.