On the effective rank of canonical polyadic decomposition of electron repulsion integrals

In this paper, we study the effective rank of the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) applied to the electron repulsion integrals, ubiquitous in quantum chemistry. We demonstrate, both mathematically and numerically, that in general the effective rank of this decomposition cannot grow linearly as a function of the system size. Moreover, we derive a lower bound for the effective rank in the form ∝NAO2/log27NAO, where NAO is the number of atomic orbitals in the molecule, under mild conditions imposed on the decomposition threshold ɛ. As a result, while a subquadratic growth of the CPD rank is not excluded, a linear relationship between the rank and NAO cannot hold universally. The implications of these findings for the use of the canonical polyadic format to represent electron repulsion integrals in quantum chemistry are analyzed.