The Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) is a reliable model for estimating the absorption spectra in molecules and solids on the basis of accurate calculation of the excited states from first principles. This challenging task includes calculation of the BSE operator in terms of two-electron integrals tensor represented in molecular orbital basis, and introduces a complicated algebraic task of solving the arising large matrix eigenvalue problem. The direct diagonalization of the BSE matrix is practically intractable due to O(N 6 ) complexity scaling in the size of the atomic orbitals basis set, N . In this paper, we present a new approach to the computation of Bethe-Salpeter excitation energies which can lead to relaxation of the numerical costs up to O(N 3 ). The idea is twofold: first, the diagonal plus low-rank tensor approximations to the fully populated blocks in the BSE matrix is constructed, enabling easier partial eigenvalue solver for a large auxiliary system relying only on matrix-vector multiplications with rank-structured matrices. And second, a small subset of eigenfunctions from the auxiliary eigenvalue problem is selected to build the Galerkin projection of the exact BSE system onto the reduced basis set. We present numerical tests on BSE calculations for a number of molecules confirming the ε-rank bounds for the blocks of BSE matrix. The numerics indicates that the reduced BSE eigenvalue problem with small matrices enables calculation of the lowest part of the excitation spectrum with sufficient accuracy. ).
1DFT or the Hartree-Fock calculations do not allow reliable estimates for excitation energies of molecular structures. One of the approaches providing means for calculation of the excited states in molecules and solids is based on the solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) [27,23,25,28,29]. The alternative methods treat the problem by using the time-dependent DFT or Green's function approach [30,10,6,31,25,29]. The approximate coupled cluster calculations of electronic excitation energies by using rank decompositions have been described in [13].The BSE model, originating from high energy physics and incorporating the many-body perturbation theory and the Green's function formalism, governs calculation of the excited states in a self-consistent way. The BSE approach leads to the challenging computational task on the solution of the eigenvalue problem for a large fully populated matrix, that is in general non-symmetric. It is worth to note that the size of BSE matrix scales quadratically in the size of the basis set, O(N 2 b ), used in ab initio electronic structure calculations. Hence the direct diagonalization is limited by O(N 6 b ) complexity making the problem computationally extensive already for moderate size molecules with the size of the atomic orbitals basis set, N b ≈ 100. Furthermore, the numerical calculation of the matrix elements, based on the precomputed two-electron integrals (TEI) in the Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals basis, has the numerical cost that scales at least as O(N 4...