Fully optimized implementation of the cluster-in-molecule local correlation approach for electron correlation calculations of large systems

A fully optimized implementation of the cluster-in-molecule (CIM) local correlation method for faster and more accurate electron correlation calculations of large systems is reported. The speedup comes from the new procedure of constructing virtual localized molecular orbitals of clusters. In the new procedure, Boughton–Pulay projection method is employed instead of a much more expensive Boys localization procedure. In addition, basis set superposition error correction for binding energy calculations and parallelized electron correlation calculations of clusters are now implemented. Benchmark calculations and illustrative applications at the Møller–Plesset perturbation theory, coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), and CCSD with perturbative triples correction levels show that this newly optimized CIM approach is a reliable theoretical tool for electron correlation calculations of various large chemical systems. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Analytic atomic gradients in the fermi-löwdin orbital self-interaction correction

We derived, implemented, and thoroughly tested the complete analytic expression for atomic forces, consisting of the Hellmann-Feynman term and the Pulay correction, for the Fermi-Löwdin orbital self-interaction correction (FLO-SIC) method. Analytic forces are shown to be numerically accurate through an extensive comparison to forces obtained from finite differences. Using the analytic forces, equilibrium structures for a small set of molecules were obtained. This work opens the possibility of routine self-interaction free geometrical relaxations of molecules using the FLO-SIC method. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An efficient atomic orbital based second-order Møller-Plesset gradient program

Based on the orbital-invariant atomic orbital formulation of the MP2 (M?ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory) energy and gradient [P. Pulay and S. Saeb?, Theor. Chim. Acta 69, 357 (1986)], we have derived and programmed detailed working equations for closed-shell MP2 gradients. The orbital-invariant form avoids the difficulties of other formulations with frozen orbitals, and allows the use of arbitrary occupied orbitals, an important consideration for local correlation theories, although the present program uses canonical molecular orbitals. The atomic orbital formulation offers savings both in storage and computer time. Test calculations on systems containing up to approximately 100 atoms and approximately 1000 basis functions, performed on a single personal computer, are reported. Parallelization of the code is underway.     

Local Hartree–Fock orbitals using a three‐level optimization strategy for the energy

Using the three‐level energy optimization procedure combined with a refined version of the least‐change strategy for the orbitals—where an explicit localization is performed at the valence basis level—it is shown how to more efficiently determine a set of local Hartree–Fock orbitals. Further, a core–valence separation of the least‐change occupied orbital space is introduced. Numerical results comparing valence basis localized orbitals and canonical molecular orbitals as starting guesses for the full basis localization are presented. The results show that the localization of the occupied orbitals may be performed at a small computational cost if valence basis localized orbitals are used as a starting guess. For the unoccupied space, about half the number of iterations are required if valence localized orbitals are used as a starting guess compared to a canonical set of unoccupied Hartree–Fock orbitals. Different local minima may be obtained when different starting guesses are used. However, the different minima all correspond to orbitals with approximately the same locality. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Are there atomic orbitals in a molecule?

Effective atomic orbitals (AOs) have been calculated by the method of the "fuzzy atoms" analysis by using the numerical molecular orbitals (MOs) obtained from plane-wave DFT calculation, i.e., without introducing any atom-centered functions. The results show that in the case of nonhypervalent atoms there are as many effective AOs with non-negligible occupation numbers, as many orbitals are in the classical minimal basis set of the given atom. This means that, for nonhypervalent systems, it is possible to present the MOs as sums of effective atomic orbitals that resemble very much the atomic minimal basis orbitals of the individual atoms (or their hybrids). For hypervalent atoms some additional orbitals basically of d-type are also of some importance; they are necessary to describe the back-donation to these positive atoms. It appears that the d-type orbitals play a similar role also for strongly positive carbon atoms. The method employed here is also useful to decide whether the use of polarization functions of a given type is a matter of conceptual importance or has only a numerical effect.     

Necessary conditions for the calculation of useful electrostatic isopotential maps from CNDO/INDO wavefunctions

The calculation of reliable electrostatic isopotential maps from CNDO or INDO wavefunctions while preserving the ZDO approximation fails because the individual atoms are treated as if they were spherical charge distributions. The resulting potential maps could be adequately interpreted on the basis of classical electrostatics. Approaches to the determination of useful maps include (a) the use of localized orbitals with a ZDO approximation applied among the localized orbitals as long as the localization procedure is defined with respect to the connectivity of the molecule and has no reference to a set of laboratory coordinates or (b) relaxation of the ZDO approximation in the determination of the potential by including the 3-center potential integrals. In either case, the preservation of rotational invariance takes paramount importance.     

Analytic derivative couplings between configuration-interaction-singles states with built-in electron-translation factors for translational invariance

We present a method for analytically calculating the derivative couplings between a pair of configuration-interaction-singles (CIS) excited states obtained in an atom-centered basis. Our theory is exact and has been derived using two completely independent approaches: one inspired by the Hellmann-Feynman theorem and the other following from direct differentiation. (The former is new, while the latter is in the spirit of existing approaches in the literature.) Our expression for the derivative couplings incorporates all Pulay effects associated with the use of an atom-centered basis, and the computational cost is minimal, roughly comparable to that of a single CIS energy gradient. We have validated our method against CIS finite-difference results and have applied it to the lowest lying excited states of naphthalene; we find that naphthalene derivative couplings include Pulay contributions sufficient to have a qualitative effect. Going beyond standard problems in analytic gradient theory, we have also constructed a correction, based on perturbative electron-translation factors, for including electronic momentum and eliminating spurious components of the derivative couplings that break translational symmetry. This correction is general and can be applied to any level of electronic structure theory.     

A definition for the covalent and ionic bond index in a molecule

Formulae for hermitian operators representing covalent, ionic, and total bond indices are derived. The eigenstates of these operators come in pairs, and can be considered as bonding, anti-bonding and lone-pair orbitals. The form of these operators is derived by generalising the rule that the bond order be defined as the net number of bonding electron pairs. The percentage of covalency and ionicity of a chemical bond may be obtained, and bond indices can also be defined between groups of atoms. The calculation of the bond indices depends only on the electron density operator, and certain projection operators used to represent each atom in the molecule. Bond indices are presented for a series of first and second row hydrides and fluorides, hydrocarbons, a metal complex, a Diels–Alder reaction and a dissociative reaction. In general the agreement between the bond indices is in accord with chemical intuition. The bond indices are shown to be stable to basis set expansion.     

Maximal orbital analysis of molecular wavefunctions

We describe a new way to decompose one-electron orbitals of a molecule into atom-centered or fragment-centered orbitals by an approach that we call “maximal orbital analysis” (MOA). The MOA analysis is based on the corresponding orbital transformation (COT) that has the unique mathematical property of maximizing any sub-trace of the overlap matrix, in Hilbert metric sense, between two sets of nonorthogonal orbitals. Here, one set comprises the molecule orbitals (Hartree–Fock, Kohn–Sham, complete-active-space, or any set of orthonormal molecular orbitals), the other set comprises the basis functions associated with an atom or a group of atoms. We show in prototypical molecular systems such as a water dimer, metal carbonyl complexes, and a mixed-valent transition metal complex, that the MOA orbitals capture very well key aspects of wavefunctions and the ensuing chemical concepts that govern electronic interactions in molecules. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Determination of extremely localized molecular orbitals in the framework of density functional theory

Extremely localized molecular orbitals are rigorously localized on only a preselected set of atoms and do not have any tails outside the localization region. The importance of these orbitals lies in their ability to be transferred from one molecule to another one. A new algorithm to determine extremely localized molecular orbitals in the framework of the density functional theory method is presented. This could also be a valuable tool in the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics methodology where localized molecular orbitals are used to describe covalent bonds across the frontier region. The present approach is used to build up the electron density of thymopentin, a polypeptide constituted by five residues, starting from extremely localized molecular orbitals determined on a set of model molecules. The results obtained confirm good transferability properties for these orbitals.Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Quantum Chemistry satellite meeting in honor of Jean-Louis Rivail     

Fast noniterative orbital localization for large molecules

We use Cholesky decomposition of the density matrix in atomic orbital basis to define a new set of occupied molecular orbital coefficients. Analysis of the resulting orbitals ("Cholesky molecular orbitals") demonstrates their localized character inherited from the sparsity of the density matrix. Comparison with the results of traditional iterative localization schemes shows minor differences with respect to a number of suitable measures of locality, particularly the scaling with system size of orbital pair domains used in local correlation methods. The Cholesky procedure for generating orthonormal localized orbitals is noniterative and may be made linear scaling. Although our present implementation scales cubically, the algorithm is significantly faster than any of the conventional localization schemes. In addition, since this approach does not require starting orbitals, it will be useful in local correlation treatments on top of diagonalization-free Hartree-Fock optimization algorithms.     

Direct energy functional minimization under orthogonality constraints

The direct energy functional minimization problem in electronic structure theory, where the single-particle orbitals are optimized under the constraint of orthogonality, is explored. We present an orbital transformation based on an efficient expansion of the inverse factorization of the overlap matrix that keeps orbitals orthonormal. The orbital transformation maps the orthogonality constrained energy functional to an approximate unconstrained functional, which is correct to some order in a neighborhood of an orthogonal but approximate solution. A conjugate gradient scheme can then be used to find the ground state orbitals from the minimization of a sequence of transformed unconstrained electronic energy functionals. The technique provides an efficient, robust, and numerically stable approach to direct total energy minimization in first principles electronic structure theory based on tight-binding, Hartree-Fock, or density functional theory. For sparse problems, where both the orbitals and the effective single-particle Hamiltonians have sparse matrix representations, the effort scales linearly with the number of basis functions N in each iteration. For problems where only the overlap and Hamiltonian matrices are sparse the computational cost scales as O(M2N), where M is the number of occupied orbitals. We report a single point density functional energy calculation of a DNA decamer hydrated with 4003 water molecules under periodic boundary conditions. The DNA fragment containing a cis-syn thymine dimer is composed of 634 atoms and the whole system contains a total of 12,661 atoms and 103,333 spherical Gaussian basis functions.     

Calculations using a set of evenly spaced S-type gaussian functions

A basis set of evenly spaced S-type Gaussian functions with common exponents is examined. Formulas for common one- and two-electron integrals are derived. Because of thesymmetry of this basis set, a very compact two-electron integral list is produced. The number of two-electron integrals that must be stored is approximately eight times the number of basis functions. Use of this basis set in an SCF calculation is examined. Numerical results show that this approach works well for molecules containing only small atoms such as hydrogen, helium, or lithium, but that the method has problems with the core orbitals of heavier atoms. Procedures for augementing this basis set in calculations involving heavier atoms are examined.     

Atomic SCF loge localized wave functions

We report in this work SCF atomic calculations for Li, Be, B, C, and Ne using a basis set of completely loge-localized functions. For these second row atoms the total volume R³ was partitioned into a spherical loge of radius R and its volume complement. The loge-localized basis functions were constructed as a product of Slater-type orbitals and a cut-off factor. The energy values obtained differ significantly from the Hartree–Fock ones indicating that the delocalization effects—not included in these calculations—are important.     

On the stability of Be3: a benchmark complete active space self-consistent field + averaged quadratic coupled cluster study

The optimized geometries and binding energies for the linear and triangular isomers of the beryllium trimer have been obtained through benchmark multireference averaged quadratic coupled cluster (AQCC) calculations using very large complete active space SCF (CASSCF) references (12 active electrons in 13 and 14 orbitals). Geometries were optimized with the cc-pV5Z basis, while the binding energies (including counterpoise correction) were obtained with the significantly larger aug-cc-pV5Z basis set. The binding energies (27.3 and 16.3 kcal/mol for the equilateral and linear isomers, respectively) are larger than the previous full CI benchmark values, while the corresponding Be-Be equilibrium distances of 4.101 and 4.088 a.u. are smaller. In view of the near-size consistency character of the CASSCF + AQCC method, the fact that all 12 electrons are fully correlated, the active reference space includes 14 orbitals, and the very large basis set used here, we propose to consider these results as reference data for Be(3). Using the electron pair localization function obtained at the CASSCF(12,15) level, it is clearly illustrated that the 2p orbitals lying in the molecular plane play a dominant role in the bonding pattern for the equilateral isomer.     

Are atoms intrinsic to molecular electronic wavefunctions? I. The FORS model

The model of the full optimized reaction space describes the electronic structure of a molecule in terms of the best wave-function that can be obtained as a superposition of all those configurations which are generate possible occupancies and couplings from a “formal minimal basis” of valence, orbitals on the constituent atoms. These configurations span a “full reaction space”, and MC SCF optimization of the orbitals in terms of an extended set of quantitative basis orbitals determines the full optimized reaction space (FORS). Basic justifications, methodological specifics and sample applications are discussed.     

Extracting covalent and ionic structures from usual delocalized wave functions: the electron-expansion methodology

We present easily programmable expansions, allowing the calculation of the weights of local covalent and ionic structures of a chemical bond from usual delocalized wave functions; they are obtained in the framework of the electron-expansion methodology, in which the hole conditions (involved by definition in a covalent or ionic structure) are expanded in terms involving only electrons. From the derived relations, true for both HF and correlated levels, one can also express the covalency/ionicity and the localization of a usual two-electron two-center (2e/2c) bond in terms of electronic populations. The three-electron populations are crucial for bond localization. On the contrary, in 2e/2c bonding, and particularly in Charge-Shift bonds (which show enhanced covalent-ionic interactions) although the three-electron populations can be non-negligible, they are not important for the covalency/ionicity of these bonds. Numerical applications and discussion are given for correlated MO wave functions of butadiene, hexatriene, and pyrrole molecules on the basis of both natural atomic orbitals (NAOs) (orthogonal orbitals) and pre-NAOs (nonorthogonal orbitals).     

Basis-set quality and basis-set bias in molecular property calculations

Quality measures for Gaussian basis sets are proposed that are based on principal angles between the basis set and reference molecular orbitals. The principal angles are obtained from the cosine-sine (CS) decomposition of orthogonal matrices and yield detailed information about basis-set convergence with respect to different regions of space. Principal angles for occupied orbitals show excellent correlation with basis-set errors in ground-state energies. Furthermore, ground-state bias in finite basis sets can be estimated from the relation between principal angles for occupied and Rydberg orbitals. Ground-state bias is observed in basis sets including extensive diffuse augmentation and affects the quality of computed molecular response properties. Principal angles and ground-state bias are investigated for the H-Ne atoms and a series of diatomics using numerical Hartree-Fock calculations as a reference. Convergence of ground-state energies and static polarizabilities is studied for the hierarchies of correlation-consistent and Karlsruhe segmented def2 basis sets including different levels of diffuse augmentation.