Phonons of metallic hydrogen with quantum Monte Carlo

Abstract

We describe a simple scheme to perform phonon calculations with quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, and demonstrate it on metallic hydrogen. Because of the energy and length scales of metallic hydrogen, and the statistical noise inherent to QMC methods, the conventional manner of calculating force constants is prohibitively expensive. We show that our alternate approach is nearly 100 times more efficient in resolving the force constants needed to calculate the phonon spectrum in the harmonic approximation. This requires only the calculation of atomic forces, as in the conventional approach, and otherwise little or no programmatic modifications.