A fast low-rank inversion algorithm of dielectric matrix in GW approximation

The dielectric response function and its inverse are crucial physical quantities in materials science. We propose an accurate and efficient strategy to invert the dielectric function matrix. The GW approximation, a powerful approach to accurately describe many-body excited states, is taken as an application to demonstrate accuracy and efficiency. We incorporate the interpolative separable density fitting (ISDF) algorithm with Sherman–Morrison–Woodbury (SMW) formula to accelerate the inversion process by exploiting low-rank properties of dielectric function in plane-wave GW calculations. Our ISDF–SMW strategy produces accurate quasiparticle energies with O(N_rN_e^2) computational cost (N_e is the number of electrons and N_r=100–1000N_e is the number of grid points) with negligible small error of 0.03 eV for both complex molecules and solids. This new strategy for inverting the dielectric matrix can be 50× faster than the current state-of-the-art implementation in BerkeleyGW, resulting in two orders of magnitude speedup for total GW calculations.