Additivity and transferability of exchange energy

Exchange energy of molecules at equilibrium geometries is shown to be highly independent of the basis set and nearly equal to the sum of the exchange energies of isolated atoms. Furthermore, molecular exchange can be predicted along a chemical series with high accuracy in terms of empirical exchange contributions associated to the constituent atoms, whose values, obtained by fitting, are similar to those of the isolated atoms. It is concluded that molecular exchange is essentially a sum of atomic contributions whose differences from those of the isolated atoms are small and characteristic of the neighboring atoms. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2010