Beyond Walkers in Stochastic Quantum Chemistry: Reducing Error Using Fast Randomized Iteration

We introduce a family of methods for the full configuration interaction problem in quantum chemistry, based on the fast randomized iteration (FRI) framework [Lim, L.-H.; Weare, J. SIAM Rev. 2017, 59, 547; DOI: 10.1137/15M1040827 ]. These methods, which we term "FCI-FRI", stochastically impose sparsity during iterations of the power method and can be viewed as a generalization of full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) without walkers. In addition to the multinomial scheme commonly used to sample excitations in FCIQMC, we present a systematic scheme where excitations are not sampled independently. Performing ground-state calculations on five small molecules at fixed cost, we find that the systematic FCI-FRI scheme is 11-45 times more statistically efficient than the multinomial FCI-FRI scheme, which is in turn 1.4-178 times more statistically efficient than the original FCIQMC algorithm.