Fast and accurate nonadiabatic molecular dynamics enabled through variational interpolation of correlated electron wavefunctions†

We build on the concept of eigenvector continuation to develop an efficient multi-state method for the rigorous and smooth interpolation of a small training set of many-body wavefunctions through chemical space at mean-field cost. The inferred states are represented as variationally optimal linear combinations of the training states transferred between the many-body bases of different nuclear geometries. We show that analytic multi-state forces and nonadiabatic couplings from the model enable application to nonadiabatic molecular dynamics, developing an active learning scheme to ensure a compact and systematically improvable training set. This culminates in application to the nonadiabatic molecular dynamics of a photoexcited 28-atom hydrogen chain, with surprising complexity in the resulting nuclear motion. With just 22 DMRG calculations of training states from the low-energy correlated electronic structure at different geometries, we infer the multi-state energies, forces and nonadiabatic coupling vectors at 12 000 geometries with provable convergence to high accuracy along an ensemble of molecular trajectories, which would not be feasible with a brute force approach. This opens up a route to bridge the timescales between accurate single-point correlated electronic structure methods and timescales of relevance for photo-induced molecular dynamics.