Stochastic sampling of quadrature grids for the evaluation of vibrational expectation values

Abstract

The thermal lines method for the evaluation of vibrational expectation values of electronic observables [B. Monserrat, Phys. Rev. B 93, 014302 (2016)] was recently proposed as a physically motivated approximation offering balance between the accuracy of direct Monte Carlo integration and the low computational cost of using local quadratic approximations. In this paper we reformulate thermal lines as a stochastic implementation of quadrature grid integration, analyze the analytical form of its bias, and extend the method to multiple point quadrature grids applicable to any factorizable harmonic or anharmonic nuclear wave function. The bias incurred by thermal lines is found to depend on the local form of the expectation value, and we demonstrate that the use of finer quadrature grids along selected modes can eliminate this bias, while still offering a ~30% lower computational cost than direct Monte Carlo integration in our tests.