Implementation of renormalized excitonic method at ab initio level

The renormalized excitonic method Hajj et al., Phys Rev B 2005, 72, 224412], in which the excited state of the whole system may be described as a linear combination of local excitations, has been implemented at ab initio level. Its performance is tested on the ionization potential and the energy gap between singlet ground state and lowest triplet for linear molecular hydrogen chains and more realistic systems, such as polyenes and polysilenes, using full configuration interaction (FCI) wave functions with a minimal basis set. The influence of different block sizes and the extent of interblock interactions are investigated. It has been demonstrated that satisfactory results can be obtained if the near degeneracies between the model space and the outer space are avoided and if interactions between the next-nearest neighbor blocks are considered. The method can be used with larger basis sets and other accurate enough ab initio evaluations (instead of FCI) of local excited states, from blocks, or from dimers or trimers of blocks. It provides a new possibility to accurately and economically describe the low-lying delocalized excited states of large systems, even inhomogeneous ones.