Over the past decade, the Python-based Simulations of Chemistry Framework (PySCF) has developed into a widely used open-source platform for electronic structure theory and quantum chemical method development. This article reviews the major advances since the previous overview in 2020, covering new modules and methodology, infrastructure changes, and performance benchmarks.

Polymorphism in molecular crystals influences their properties and performance. Crystal structure prediction (CSP) can help explore the crystal structure landscape and discover potentially stable polymorphs computationally. We present a new version of the Genarris open-source code, which generates random molecular crystal structures in all space groups and applies physical constraints on intermolecular distances. The main new feature in Genarris 3.0 is the ``Rigid Press" algorithm, which uses a regularized hard-sphere potential to compress the unit cell and achieve a maximally close-packed structure based on purely geometric considerations without performing any energy evaluations. In addition, Genarris 3.0 is interfaced with machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) to accelerate the exploration of the potential energy landscape. We present a new clustering and down-selection workflow that employs the MACE-OFF23(L) MLIPs to perform geometry optimization and energy ranking in the early stages. We use Genarris 3.0 to successfully predict the structure of six targets: aspirin, Target I and Target XXII from previous CSP blind tests, and the energetic materials HMX, CL-20, and DNI. We further analyze the performance of MACE-OFF23(L) compared to dispersion-inclusive density functional theory (DFT) for geometry relaxation and energy ranking. We find significant variability in the performance of MACE-OFF23(L) across chemically diverse targets with particularly poor performance for energetic materials, which is mitigated by our clustering and down-selection procedure. Genarris 3.0 can thus be used effectively to perform CSP and to generate molecular crystal datasets for training ML models.

In this contribution, we give an overview of the ELPA library and ELSI interface, which are crucial elements for large-scale electronic structure calculations in FHI-aims. ELPA is a key solver library that provides efficient solutions for both standard and generalized eigenproblems, which are central to the Kohn-Sham formalism in density functional theory (DFT). It supports CPU and GPU architectures, with full support for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, and ongoing development for Intel GPUs. Here we also report the results of recent optimizations, leading to significant improvements in GPU performance for the generalized eigenproblem. ELSI is an open-source software interface layer that creates a well-defined connection between "user" electronic structure codes and "solver" libraries for the Kohn-Sham problem, abstracting the step between Hamilton and overlap matrices (as input to ELSI and the respective solvers) and eigenvalues and eigenvectors or density matrix solutions (as output to be passed back to the "user" electronic structure code). In addition to ELPA, ELSI supports solvers including LAPACK and MAGMA, the PEXSI and NTPoly libraries (which bypass an explicit eigenvalue solution), and several others.

I generalize the well-known classical Metropolis-Hastings algorithm into a quantum algorithm that can equilibrate, measure, and mix a quantum thermal state on a quantum computer. It performs non-symmetric transitions on labels of state preparation and measurement operations and rejects transitions using imprecise energies extracted by Gaussian-filtered quantum phase estimation.

This Roadmap article provides a succinct, comprehensive overview of the state of electronic structure (ES) methods and software for molecular and materials simulations. Seventeen distinct sections collect insights by 51 leading scientists in the field. Each contribution addresses the status of a particular area, as well as current challenges and anticipated future advances, with a particular eye towards software related aspects and providing key references for further reading. Foundational sections cover density functional theory and its implementation in real-world simulation frameworks, Green's function based many-body perturbation theory, wave-function based and stochastic ES approaches, relativistic effects and semiempirical ES theory approaches. Subsequent sections cover nuclear quantum effects, real-time propagation of the ES, challenges for computational spectroscopy simulations, and exploration of complex potential energy surfaces. The final sections summarize practical aspects, including computational workflows for complex simulation tasks, the impact of current and future high-performance computing architectures, software engineering practices, education and training to maintain and broaden the community, as well as the status of and needs for ES based modeling from the vantage point of industry environments. Overall, the field of ES software and method development continues to unlock immense opportunities for future scientific discovery, based on the growing ability of computations to reveal complex phenomena, processes and properties that are determined by the make-up of matter at the atomic scale, with high precision.

Histidine can be protonated on either or both of the two N atoms of the imidazole moiety. Each of the three possible forms occurs as a result of the stereochemical environment of the histidine side chain. In an atomic model, comparing the possible protonation states in situ, looking at possible hydrogen bonding and metal coordination, it is possible to predict which is most likely to be correct. A more direct method is described that uses quantum-mechanical methods to calculate, also in situ, the minimum geometry and energy for comparison, and therefore to more accurately identify the most likely protonation state.

This data set contains high-level quantum chemistry data (CCSD(T)/def2-QZVPP) for a set of 120,000 randomly-generated hydrogen clusters, along with data from other levels of theory (HF, MP2, CCSD), including 3 density functionals (PBE, B3LYP, omegaB97M-V) and 4 semiempirical models (AM1, PM7, GFN1, & GFN2). This entry also includes the workflow scripts used to generate the data and the post-processing scripts used to analyze and visualize it. By the standards of quantum chemistry data sets, this is a large and challenging test for electronic structure methods and models. These structures tend to have open-shell ground states that can be difficult to find.

There are many atomistic simulation methods with very different costs, accuracies, transferabilities, and numbers of empirical parameters. I show how statistical model selection can compare these methods fairly, even when they are very different. These comparisons are also useful for developing new methods that balance cost and accuracy. As an example, I build a semiempirical model for hydrogen clusters.

In this work we present a detailed analysis of variational quantum phase estimation (VQPE), a method based on real-time evolution for ground and excited state estimation on near-term hardware. We derive the theoretical ground on which the approach stands, and demonstrate that it provides one of the most compact variational expansions to date for solving strongly correlated Hamiltonians. At the center of VQPE lies a set of equations, with a simple geometrical interpretation, which provides conditions for the time evolution grid in order to decouple eigenstates out of the set of time evolved expansion states, and connects the method to the classical filter diagonalization algorithm. Further, we introduce what we call the unitary formulation of VQPE, in which the number of matrix elements that need to be measured scales linearly with the number of expansion states, and we provide an analysis of the effects of noise which substantially improves previous considerations. The unitary formulation allows for a direct comparison to iterative phase estimation. Our results mark VQPE as both a natural and highly efficient quantum algorithm for ground and excited state calculations of general many-body systems. We demonstrate a hardware implementation of VQPE for the transverse field Ising model. Further, we illustrate its power on a paradigmatic example of strong correlation (Cr2 in the SVP basis set), and show that it is possible to reach chemical accuracy with as few as 50 timesteps.

We present SpectrumSDT - a program for calculations of energies and lifetimes of bound rotational vibrational states below and scattering resonances above the dissociation threshold on a global potential energy surface of a triatomic system, which may include stable molecules, weekly-bound van-derWaals complexes, and unbound atom + diatom scattering systems. Large-amplitude vibrational motion is treated explicitly using hyper-spherical coordinates. Three options for the rotational-vibrational interaction are supported: uncoupled (symmetric top rotor), partially coupled (to include interaction between several nearest states only) and full-coupled (vibrating asymmetric-top rotor). In addition to energies and lifetimes, SpectrumSDT is able to integrate ro-vibrational wave functions over the user defined regions of potential energy surface, which helps to classify these states. In this release of the code, SpectrumSDT is limited to ABA-type molecules with wave functions that do not extend into the regions near Eckart singularities. Program summary Program title: SpectrumSDT CPC Library link to program files: https://doi.org/10.17632/9gftxjs4yk.1 Developer's repository link: https://github.com/IgorGayday/SpectrumSDT Licensing provisions: GNU General Public License 3 (GPL) Programming language: Fortran Nature of problem: Calculations of energies and lifetimes of bound rotational-vibrational states below and scattering resonances above the dissociation threshold on a global potential energy surface of a triatomic system, which may include stable molecules, weekly-bound van-der-Waals complexes, and unbound atom + diatom scattering systems. Solution method: A Hamiltonian matrix is built in APH coordinates using an optimal 2D basis set, adjusted for a given problem. A complex absorbing potential (CAP) is added to define a boundary condition for calculation of scattering resonances above the dissociation threshold. The eigenstates of the Hamiltonain matrix are found using a state-of-the-art iterative eigensolver. Restrictions: The present version is restricted to ABA-molecules and wave functions that do not extend into linear and equilateral triangle configurations. Additional comments including restriction and unusual features: Probabilities and lifetimes of the wave functions can be calculated in user-defined regions on the PES, which allows to analyze their localization properties (i.e. automatic isotopomer assignment) and obtain channel-specific lifetimes for scattering resonances. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper describes our work over the past few years to use tools from quantum chemistry to describe electronic structure of nanoelectronic devices. These devices, dubbed "artificial atoms," comprise a few electrons, confined by semiconductor heterostructures, impurities, and patterned electrodes, and are of intense interest due to potential applications in quantum information processing, quantum sensing, and extreme-scale classical logic. We detail two approaches we have employed: finite-element and Gaussian basis sets, exploring the interesting complications that arise when techniques that were intended to apply to atomic systems are instead used for artificial, solid-state devices.

The solution of eigenproblems is often a key computational bottleneck that limits the tractable system size of numerical algorithms, among them electronic structure theory in chemistry and in condensed matter physics. Large eigenproblems can easily exceed the capacity of a single compute node, thus must be solved on distributed-memory parallel computers. We here present GPU-oriented optimizations of the ELPA two-stage tridiagonalization eigensolver (ELPA2). On top of cuBLAS-based GPU offloading, we add a CUDA kernel to speed up the back-transformation of eigenvectors, which can be the computationally most expensive part of the two-stage tridiagonalization algorithm. We benchmark the performance of this GPU-accelerated eigensolver on two hybrid CPU–GPU architectures, namely a compute cluster based on Intel Xeon Gold CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, and the Summit supercomputer based on IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs. Consistent with previous benchmarks on CPU-only architectures, the GPU-accelerated two-stage solver exhibits a parallel performance superior to the one-stage counterpart. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the GPU-accelerated eigensolver developed in this work for routine semi-local KS-DFT calculations comprising thousands of atoms.

We implement and benchmark the frozen core approximation, a technique commonly adopted in electronic structure theory to reduce the computational cost by means of mathematically fixing the chemically inactive core electron states. The accuracy and efficiency of this approach are well controlled by a single parameter, the number of frozen orbitals. Explicit corrections for the frozen core orbitals and the unfrozen valence orbitals are introduced, safeguarding against seemingly minor numerical deviations from the assumed orthonormality conditions of the basis functions. A speedup of over twofold can be achieved for the diagonalization step in all-electron density-functional theory simulations containing heavy elements, without any accuracy degradation in terms of the electron density, total energy, and atomic forces. This is demonstrated in a benchmark study covering 103 materials across the Periodic Table and a large-scale simulation of CsPbBr3 with 2560 atoms. Our study provides a rigorous benchmark of the precision of the frozen core approximation (sub-meV per atom for frozen core orbitals below -200 eV) for a wide range of test cases and for chemical elements ranging from Li to Po. The algorithms discussed here are implemented in the open-source Electronic Structure Infrastructure software package.

Routine applications of electronic structure theory to molecules and periodic systems need to compute the electron density from given Hamiltonian and, in case of non-orthogonal basis sets, overlap matrices. System sizes can range from few to thousands or, in some examples, millions of atoms. Different discretization schemes (basis sets) and different system geometries (finite non-periodic vs. infinite periodic boundary conditions) yield matrices with different structures. The ELectronic Structure Infrastructure (ELSI) project provides an open-source software interface to facilitate the implementation and optimal use of high-performance solver libraries covering cubic scaling eigensolvers, linear scaling density-matrix-based algorithms, and other reduced scaling methods in between. In this paper, we present recent improvements and developments inside ELSI, mainly covering (1) new solvers connected to the interface, (2) matrix layout and communication adapted for parallel calculations of periodic and/or spin-polarized systems, (3) routines for density matrix extrapolation in geometry optimization and molecular dynamics calculations, and (4) general utilities such as parallel matrix I/O and JSON output. The ELSI interface has been integrated into four electronic structure code projects (DFTB+, DGDFT, FHI-aims, SIESTA), allowing us to rigorously benchmark the performance of the solvers on an equal footing. Based on results of a systematic set of large-scale benchmarks performed with Kohn-Sham density-functional theory and density-functional tight-binding theory, we identify factors that strongly affect the efficiency of the solvers, and propose a decision layer that assists with the solver selection process. Finally, we describe a reverse communication interface encoding matrix-free iterative solver strategies that are amenable, e.g., for use with planewave basis sets. Program summary Program title: ELSI Interface CPC Library link to program files: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/473mbbznrs.1 Licensing provisions: BSD 3-clause Programming language: Fortran 2003, with interface to C/C++ External routines/libraries: BLACS, BLAS, BSEPACK (optional), EigenExa (optional), ELPA, FortJSON, LAPACK, libOMM, MPI, MAGMA (optional), MUMPS (optional), NTPoly, ParMETIS (optional), PETSc (optional), PEXSI, PT-SCOTCH (optional), ScaLAPACK, SLEPc (optional), SuperLU_DIST Nature of problem: Solving the electronic structure from given Hamiltonian and overlap matrices in electronic structure calculations. Solution method: ELSI provides a unified software interface to facilitate the use of various electronic structure solvers including cubic scaling dense eigensolvers, linear scaling density matrix methods, and other approaches. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Classical-quantum computational complexity separations are an important motivation for the long-term development of digital quantum computers, but classical-quantum complexity equivalences are just as important in our present era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices for framing near-term progress towards quantum supremacy. We establish one such equivalence using a noisy quantum circuit model that can be simulated efficiently on classical computers. With respect to its noise model, quantum states have a robust decomposition into a sequence of operations that each extend the state by one qubit without spreading errors between qubits. This enables universal quantum sampling of states with an efficient representation in this robust form and observables with low quantum weight that can be sampled from general measurements on a few qubits and computational basis measurements on the remaining qubits. These robust decompositions are not unique, and we construct two distinct variants, both of which are compatible with machine-learning methodology. They both enable efficiently computable lower bounds on von Neumann entropy and thus can be used as finite-temperature variational quantum Monte Carlo methods.

We develop a scheme for engineering genuine thermal states in analog quantum simulation platforms by coupling local degrees of freedom to driven, dissipative ancilla pseudospins. We demonstrate the scheme in a many-body quantum spin lattice simulation setting. A Born-Markov master equation describing the dynamics of the many-body system is developed, and we show that if the ancilla energies are periodically modulated, with a carefully chosen hierarchy of timescales, one can effectively thermalize the many-body system. Through analysis of the time-dependent dynamical generator, we determine the conditions under which the true thermal state is an approximate dynamical fixed point for general system Hamiltonians. Finally, we evaluate the thermalization protocol through numerical simulation and discuss prospects for implementation on current quantum simulation hardware.

Even as today’s most prominent spin-based qubit technologies are maturing in terms of capability and sophistication, there is growing interest in exploring alternate material platforms that may provide advantages, such as enhanced qubit control, longer coherence times, and improved extensibility. Recent advances in heterostructure material growth have opened new possibilities for employing hole spins in semiconductors for qubit applications. Undoped, strained Ge/SiGe quantum wells are promising candidate hosts for hole spin-based qubits due to their low disorder, large intrinsic spin–orbit coupling strength, and absence of valley states. Here, we use a simple one-layer gated device structure to demonstrate both a single quantum dot as well as coupling between two adjacent quantum dots. The hole effective mass in these undoped structures, m* ∼ 0.08 m0, is significantly lower than for electrons in Si/SiGe, pointing to the possibility of enhanced tunnel couplings in quantum dots and favorable qubit–qubit interactions in an industry-compatible semiconductor platform.

We prove and apply an optimal low-rank approximation of the Cauchy kernel over separated real domains. A skeleton decomposition is the minimum over real-valued functions of the maximum relative pointwise error. We establish a numerically stable form for the decomposition and demonstrate an example for which it is arbitrarily more accurate than singular value decompositions.