Analysis of the single reference coupled cluster method for electronic structure calculations: the full-coupled cluster equations

Abstract The central problem in electronic structure theory is the computation of the eigenvalues of the electronic Hamiltonian—a semi-unbounded, self-adjoint operator acting on an $$L^2$$ L 2 -type Hilbert space of antisymmetric functions. Coupled cluster (CC) methods, which are based on a non-linear parameterisation of the sought-after eigenfunction and result in non-linear systems of equations, are the method of choice for high-accuracy quantum chemical simulations. The existing numerical analysis of coupled cluster methods relies on a local, strong monotonicity property of the CC function that is valid only in a perturbative regime, i.e., when the sought-after ground state CC solution is sufficiently close to zero. In this article, we introduce a new well-posedness analysis for the single reference coupled cluster method based on the invertibility of the CC derivative. Under the minimal assumption that the sought-after eigenfunction is intermediately normalisable and the associated eigenvalue is isolated and non-degenerate, we prove that the continuous (infinite-dimensional) CC equations are always locally well-posed. Under the same minimal assumptions and provided that the discretisation is fine enough, we prove that the discrete Full-CC equations are locally well-posed, and we derive residual-based error estimates with guaranteed positive constants. Preliminary numerical experiments indicate that the constants that appear in our estimates are a significant improvement over those obtained from the local monotonicity approach.