Density Matrix Renormalization Group for Transcorrelated Hamiltonians: Ground and Excited States in Molecules

We present the theory of a density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm which can solve for both the ground and excited states of non-Hermitian transcorrelated Hamiltonians and show applications in molecular systems. Transcorrelation (TC) accelerates the basis set convergence rate by including known physics (such as, but not limited to, the electron–electron cusp) in the Jastrow factor used for the similarity transformation. It also improves the accuracy of approximate methods such as coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) as shown by recent studies. However, the non-Hermiticity of the TC Hamiltonians poses challenges for variational methods like DMRG. Imaginary-time evolution on the matrix product state (MPS) in the DMRG framework has been proposed to circumvent this problem, but this is currently limited to treating the ground state and has lower efficiency than the time-independent DMRG (TI-DMRG) due to the need to eliminate Trotter errors. In this work, we show that with minimal changes to the existing TI-DMRG algorithm, namely, replacing the original Davidson solver with the general Davidson solver to solve the non-Hermitian effective Hamiltonians at each site for a few low-lying right eigenstates, and following the rest of the original DMRG recipe, one can find the ground and excited states with improved efficiency compared to the original DMRG when extrapolating to the infinite bond dimension limit in the same basis set. An accelerated basis set convergence rate is also observed, as expected, within the TC framework.