Lester William A Lester – författare

This invaluable book consists of 16 chapters written by some of the most notable researchers in the field of quantum Monte Carlo, highlighting the advances made since Lester Jr.''s 1997 monograph with the same title. It may be regarded as the proceedings of the Symposium on Advances in Quantum Monte Carlo Methods held during the Pacifichem meeting in December 2000, but the contributions go beyond what was presented there.

The quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method is gaining interest as a complement to basis set ab initio methods in cases where high accuracy computation of atomic and molecular properties is desired. This volume focuses on recent advances in this area. QMC as used here refers to methods that directly solve the Schrödinger equation, for example, diffusion and Green''s function Monte Carlo, as well as variational Monte Carlo. The latter is an approach to computing atomic and molecular properties by the Monte Carlo method that has fundamental similarities to basis set methods with the exception that the limitation to one-particle basis functions to facilitate integral evaluation is avoided. This feature makes possible the consideration of many-body wave functions containing explicitly interparticle distances — a capability common to all variants of QMC.

This book presents the basic theory and application of the Monte Carlo method to the electronic structure of atoms and molecules. It assumes no previous knowledge of the subject, only a knowledge of molecular quantum mechanics at the first-year graduate level. A working knowledge of traditional ab initio quantum chemistry is helpful, but not essential.Some distinguishing features of this book are: