Assessment of the extended Koopmans' theorem for the chemical reactivity: Accurate computations of chemical potentials,chemical hardnesses,and electrophilicity indices

The extended Koopmans' theorem (EKT) provides a straightforward way to compute ionization potentials and electron affinities from any level of theory. Although it is widely applied to ionization potentials, the EKT approach has not been applied to evaluation of the chemical reactivity. We present the first benchmarking study to investigate the performance of the EKT methods for predictions of chemical potentials (μ) (hence electronegativities), chemical hardnesses (η), and electrophilicity indices (ω). We assess the performance of the EKT approaches for post‐Hartree–Fock methods, such as Møller–Plesset perturbation theory, the coupled‐electron pair theory, and their orbital‐optimized counterparts for the evaluation of the chemical reactivity. Especially, results of the orbital‐optimized coupled‐electron pair theory method (with the aug‐cc‐pVQZ basis set) for predictions of the chemical reactivity are very promising; the corresponding mean absolute errors are 0.16, 0.28, and 0.09 eV for μ, η, and ω, respectively. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.