Variational quantum approaches for computing vibrational energies of polyatomic molecules

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In this article, we review state-of-the-art methods for computing vibrational energies of polyatomic molecules using quantum mechanical, variationally-based approaches. We illustrate the power of those methods by presenting applications to molecules with more than four atoms. This demonstrates the great progress that has been made in this field in the last decade in dealing with the exponential scaling with the number of vibrational degrees of freedom. In this review we present three methods that effectively obviate this bottleneck. The first important idea is the n-mode representation of the Hamiltonian and notably the potential. The potential (and other functions) is represented as a sum of terms that depend on a subset of the coordinates. This makes it possible to compute matrix elements, form a Hamiltonian matrix, and compute its eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. Another approach takes advantage of this multimode representation and represents the terms as a sum of products. It then exploits the powerful multiconfiguration Hartree time-dependent method to solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation and extract the eigenvalue spectrum. The third approach we present uses contracted basis functions in conjunction with a Lanczos eigensolver. Matrix vector products are done without transforming to a direct-product grid. The usefulness of these methods is demonstrated for several example molecules, e.g. methane, methanol and the Zundel cation.