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High-performance linear-scaling electronic structure method via chromatic superposition states

Materials Science 2026-05-21 v1

Abstract

We introduce a high-performance linear-scaling electronic structure method that employs chromatic superposition states (CSS) as a low-dimensional, high-fidelity representation, which can be orders of magnitude smaller than the full Hilbert space. Grounded in the system's finite correlation length, the CSS representation aggregates the uncorrelated orbitals into a single basis via a graph-coloring scheme, and is independent of the system size yet accurately preserves all sparse operators in solving the Kohn-Sham equations. The projection onto CSSs is efficiently computed by employing the block-Lanczos Krylov method which features high hardware efficiency and linear-scaling cost, enabling fast calculation of large-scale Kohn-Sham density matrix. We show that this method already outperforms previous linear-scaling density matrix purification method by more than one order of magnitude in computational speed at even small scale, while preserving high accuracy. The practical utility of the CSS method is demonstrated through molecular dynamics simulation of a 10000 H2OH_2O, and self-consistent calculation of a 1-million H2OH_2O with modest resources.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.20918,
  title  = {High-performance linear-scaling electronic structure method via chromatic superposition states},
  author = {Zhikang Jiang and Zhizhi Xiao and Mingfa Tang and Weiyu Li and Zhaoru Sun and Ke Xia and Youqi Ke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.20918},
  year   = {2026}
}

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Submitted to npj Computational Materials