Spin-free orbital entropy, mutual information, and correlation analysis

Abstract

Orbital entropies, pair entropies, and mutual information have become popular tools for analysis of strongly correlated wave functions. They can quantitatively measure how strongly an orbital (e.g. from the DMRG active space) participates in the strong correlation and reveal the entanglement pattern between different orbitals. However, this pattern can become rather complicated and sometimes difficult to interpret for large active spaces and is not invariant with respect to the spin projection ($M_s$) component of the spin multiplet state. We introduce a modified spin-free orbital entropy, pair entropy, and mutual information, which simplify the entanglement analysis and are invariant with respect to $M_s$. By comparison of these quantities with their ``original'' spin-including counterparts one can distinguish static correlation due to spin couplings from the ``genuine'' strong correlation due to a multiconfigurational character of the wave function. We illustrate the approach on a model consisting of a non-interacting dimer of triplet diradicals and on a more realistic example of iron-sulfur bound complexes with one and two iron atoms.