Excited states using semistochastic heat-bath configuration interaction

We extend our recently developed heat-bath configuration interaction (HCI) algorithm, and our semistochastic algorithm for performing multireference perturbation theory, to calculate excited-state wavefunctions and energies. We employ time-reversal symmetry, which reduces the memory requirements by more than a factor of two. An extrapolation technique is introduced to reliably extrapolate HCI energies to the full CI limit. The resulting algorithm is used to compute fourteen low-lying potential energy surfaces of the carbon dimer using the cc-pV5Z basis set, with an estimated error in energy of 30-50 μHa compared to full CI. The excitation energies obtained using our algorithm have a mean absolute deviation of 0.02 eV compared to experimental values.