Cumulant Green's function methods for molecules†

Abstract

The cumulant expansion of the Green's function is a computationally efficient beyond-GW approach renowned for its significant enhancement of satellite features in materials. In contrast to the ubiquitous GW approximation of many-body perturbation theory, ab initio cumulant expansions performed on top of GW (GW + C) have demonstrated the capability to handle multi-particle processes by incorporating higher-order correlation effects or vertex corrections, yielding better agreements between experiment and theory for satellite structures. While widely employed in condensed matter physics, very few applications of GW + C have been published on molecular systems. Here, we assess the performance of this scheme on a series of 10-electron molecular systems (Ne, HF, H₂O, NH₃, and CH₄) where full configuration interaction estimates of the outer-valence quasiparticle and satellite energies are available.