Antoine Levitt

Xavier Antoine, Antoine Levitt, Qinglin Tang

We propose a preconditioned nonlinear conjugate gradient method coupled with a spectral spatial dis-cretization scheme for computing the ground states (GS) of rotating Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC), modeled by the Gross-Pitaevskii Equation (GPE). We first start by reviewing the classical gradient flow (also known as imaginary time (IMT)) method which considers the problem from the PDE standpoint, leading to numerically solve a dissipative equation. Based on this IMT equation, we analyze the forward Euler (FE), Crank-Nicolson (CN) and the classical backward Euler (BE) schemes for linear problems and recognize classical power iterations, allowing us to derive convergence rates. By considering the alternative point of view of minimization problems, we propose the preconditioned gradient (PG) and conjugate gradient (PCG) methods for the GS computation of the GPE. We investigate the choice of the preconditioner, which plays a key role in the acceleration of the convergence process. The performance of the new algorithms is tested in 1D, 2D and 3D. We conclude that the PCG method outperforms all the previous methods, most particularly for 2D and 3D fast rotating BECs, while being simple to implement.

Antoine Levitt

The numerical solution of the Hartree-Fock equations is a central problem in quantum chemistry for which numerous algorithms exist. Attempts to justify these algorithms mathematically have been made, notably in by Cances and Le Bris in 2000, but, to our knowledge, no complete convergence proof has been published. In this paper, we prove the convergence of a natural gradient algorithm, using a gradient inequality for analytic functionals due to Lojasiewicz. Then, expanding upon the analysis of Cances and Le Bris, we prove convergence results for the Roothaan and Level-Shifting algorithms. In each case, our method of proof provides estimates on the convergence rate. We compare these with numerical results for the algorithms studied.

Anil Damle, Antoine Levitt, Lin Lin

Wannier functions provide a localized representation of spectral subspaces of periodic Hamiltonians, and play an important role for interpreting and accelerating Hartree-Fock and Kohn-Sham density functional theory calculations in quantum physics and chemistry. For systems with isolated band structure, the existence of exponentially localized Wannier functions and numerical algorithms for finding them are well studied. In contrast, for systems with entangled band structure, Wannier functions must be generalized to span a subspace larger than the spectral subspace of interest to achieve favorable spatial locality. In this setting, little is known about the theoretical properties of these Wannier functions, and few algorithms can find them robustly. We develop a variational formulation to compute these generalized maximally localized Wannier functions. When paired with an initial guess based on the selected columns of the density matrix (SCDM) method, our method can robustly find Wannier functions for systems with entangled band structure. We formulate the problem as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem, and show how the widely used disentanglement procedure can be interpreted as a splitting method to approximately solve this problem. We demonstrate the performance of our method using real materials including silicon, copper, and aluminum. To examine more precisely the localization properties of Wannier functions, we study the free electron gas in one and two dimensions, where we show that the maximally-localized Wannier functions only decay algebraically. We also explain using a one dimensional example how to modify them to obtain super-algebraic decay.

Ewen Lallinec, Antoine Levitt

We present a comparative study of numerical methods for computingelectronic densities of states (DOS) in periodic systems. We provide a detailed analysis of the domain of validity of the Brillouincomplex deformation (BCD), a recently-proposed method promising exponential convergence without need for smearing. We compare on a range of systems the BCD with several methods, including the standard smearing and linear tetrahedron methods, as well as an adaptive integration method. Our results establish clear performance regimes for each method, offering practical guidance for DOS computations across a range of systems and accuracy requirements.

Antoine Levitt, Christoph Ortner

Algorithms for computing local minima of smooth objective functions enjoy a mature theory as well as robust and efficient implementations. By comparison, the theory and practice of saddle search is destitute. In this paper we present results for idealized versions of the dimer and gentlest ascent (GAD) saddle search algorithms that show-case the limitations of what is theoretically achievable within the current class of saddle search algorithms: (1) we present an improved estimate on the region of attraction of saddles; and (2) we construct quasi-periodic solutions which indicate that it is impossible to obtain globally convergent variants of dimer and GAD type algorithms.

Antoine Levitt, Marc Torrent

We consider the problem of parallelizing electronic structure computations in plane-wave Density Functional Theory. Because of the limited scalability of Fourier transforms, parallelism has to be found at the eigensolver level. We show how a recently proposed algorithm based on Chebyshev polynomials can scale into the tens of thousands of processors, outperforming block conjugate gradient algorithms for large computations.