English

Seniority-zero Quadratic Canonical Transformation Theory

Chemical Physics 2026-04-30 v1

Abstract

We propose a method to solve the Schr\"odinger equation for systems with static/strong electron correlation using Hamiltonian transformations. Building on our previous work on seniority-zero canonical transformation theory, which seeks a unitary transformation that maps the Hamiltonian into the seniority-zero space, this method presents an alternative way of evaluating the Baker--Campbell--Hausdorff (BCH) expansion based on quadratic canonical transformation theory. The extension aims to relax the small-generator constraint by allowing approximate four-body contributions in the expansion, thus expanding the class of excitations previously allowed in SZ-LCT, where only approximate three-body operators were retained. Numerical tests reveal that the seniority-zero quadratic canonical transformation method (SZ-QCT) delivers good accuracy, with most errors within chemical accuracy. In particular, SZ-QCT shows sub-millihartree errors in cases where larger generators are needed to recover the residual dynamic correlation. The computational scaling of SZ-QCT is the same as that of SZ-LCT, O(N8/nc)\mathcal{O}(N^8/n_c), where ncn_c is the number of cores available for the computation

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.26202,
  title  = {Seniority-zero Quadratic Canonical Transformation Theory},
  author = {Daniel F. Calero-Osorio and Paul W. Ayers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.26202},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:40:20.293Z