The Quest for Better Wavefunctions

One of the nice features of QMC is the freedom in the choice of wavefunction. The downside is it can be time consuming and unwieldy to optimize them in VMC.

In a recent article - Backflow Correlations for the Electron Gas and Metallic Hydrogen - Holzmann, et al. look at improving wavefunctions through adding analytic information.

The section with the Feynman-Kacs approach uses a cumulant expansion. In case you (read: me) need a reminder of the cumulant expansion, look at this online statistics text (chapter 8.4).