A hierarchical construction scheme for accurate potential energy surface generation: an application to the F+H2 reaction

We present a hierarchical construction scheme for accurate ab initio potential energy surface generation. The scheme is based on the observation that when molecular configuration changes, the variation in the potential energy difference between different ab initio methods is much smaller than the variation for potential energy itself. This means that it is easier to numerically represent energy difference to achieve a desired accuracy. Because the computational cost for ab initio calculations increases very rapidly with the accuracy, one can gain substantial saving in computational time by constructing a high accurate potential energy surface as a sum of a low accurate surface based on extensive ab initio data points and an energy difference surface for high and low accuracy ab initio methods based on much fewer data points. The new scheme was applied to construct an accurate ground potential energy surface for the FH(2) system using the coupled-cluster method and a very large basis set. The constructed potential energy surface is found to be more accurate on describing the resonance states in the FH(2) and FHD systems than the existing surfaces.