Abstract
Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods such as variational Monte Carlo and fixed node diffusion Monte Carlo depend heavily on the quality of the trial wave function. Although Slater-Jastrow wave functions are the most commonly used variational ansatz in electronic structure, more sophisticated wave functions are critical to ascertaining new physics. One such wave function is the multi-Slater- Jastrow wave function which consists of a Jastrow function multiplied by the sum of Slater deter- minants. In this paper we describe a method for working with these wave functions in QMC codes that is easy to implement, efficient both in computational speed as well as memory, and easily par- allelized. The computational cost scales quadratically with particle number making this scaling no worse than the single determinant case and linear with the total number of excitations. Addition- ally, we implement this method and use it to compute the ground state energy of a water molecule. © 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3665391]