Related papers: Diamond and $\beta$-tin structures of Si studied w…
We have studied the diamond -> beta-tin phase transition in Si using diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) methods. Slater-Jastrow-backflow trial wave functions give lower DMC energies than Slater-Jastrow ones, and backflow slightly favors…
The pressure-induced structural phase transition from diamond to beta-tin in silicon is an excellent test for theoretical total energy methods. The transition pressure provides a sensitive measure of small relative energy changes between…
We investigate the pressure-induced metal-insulator transition from diamond to beta-tin in bulk Silicon, using quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and density functional theory (DFT) approaches. We show that it is possible to efficiently describe…
Silicon undergoes a phase transition from the semiconducting diamond phase to the metallic beta-Sn phase under pressure. We use quantum Monte Carlo calculations to predict the transformation pressure and compare the results to density…
The fixed node diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) method has attracted interest in recent years as a way to calculate properties of solid materials with high accuracy. However, the framework for the calculation of properties such as total…
Motivated by the disagreement between recent diffusion Monte Carlo calculations and experiments on the phase transition pressure between the ambient and beta-Sn phases of silicon, we present a study of the HCP to BCC phase transition in…
We report diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations on MgO in the rock-salt and CsCl structures. The calculations are based on Hartree-Fock pseudopotentials, with the single-particle orbitals entering the correlated wave function being…
We use the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) method to calculate the ground state phase diagram of solid molecular hydrogen and examine the stability of the most important insulating phases relative to metallic crystalline molecular…
While Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) is in principle an exact stochastic method for \textit{ab initio} electronic structure calculations, in practice the fermionic sign problem necessitates the use of the fixed-node approximation and trial…
The many-body diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) method with twist-averaged boundary conditions is used to calculate the ground-state equation of state and the energetics of point defects in fcc aluminum using supercells up to 1331 atoms.…
Quantum Monte Carlo approaches such as the diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) method are among the most accurate many-body methods for extended systems. Their scaling makes them well suited for defect calculations in solids. We review the various…
Fixed node diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) has been performed on a test set of forward and reverse barrier heights for 19 non-hydrogen-transfer reactions, and the nodal error has been assessed. The DMC results are robust to changes in the nodal…
Silica is an abundant component of the Earth whose crystalline polymorphs play key roles in its structure and dynamics. As the simplest silicates, understanding pure silica is a prerequisite to understanding the rocky part of the Earth, its…
We present an accurate study of the static-nucleus electronic energy band gap of solid molecular hydrogen at high pressure. The excitonic and quasiparticle gaps of the $C2/c$, $Pc$, $Pbcn$, and $P6_3/m$ structures at pressures of 250, 300,…
We study the low-pressure (0 to 10 GPa) phase diagram of crystalline benzene using quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and density functional theory (DFT) methods. We consider the $Pbca$, $P4_32_12$, and $P2_1/c$ structures as the best candidates for…
Fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) is a stochastic algorithm for finding the lowest energy many-fermion wave function with the same nodal surface as a chosen trial function. It has proved itself among the most accurate methods available…
We present an improved first-principles description of melting under pressure based on thermodynamic integration comparing Density Functional Theory (DFT) and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) treatments of the system. The method is applied to…
The Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) method is applied to the water monomer, dimer, and hexamer, using q-TIP4P/F, one of the most simple, empirical water models with flexible monomers. The bias in the time step ($\Delta\tau$) and population size…
We have investigated the structural sequence of the high-pressure phases of silicon and germanium. We have focussed on the cd->beta-tin->Imma->sh phase transitions. We have used the plane-wave pseudopotential approach to the…
We have used diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) simulations to calculate the energy barrier for H$_2$ dissociation on the Mg(0001) surface. The calculations employ pseudopotentials and systematically improvable B-spline basis sets to expand the…