Electron correlation by polarization of interacting densities

Estimates of electron correlation based on density expansions

Two methods for estimating the correlation energy of molecules and other electronic systems are discussed based on the assumption that the correlation energy can be partitioned between atomic regions. In the first method, the electron density is expanded in terms of atomic contributions using rigorous electron repulsion bounds, and in the second method, correlation contributions are associated with basis function pairs. These methods do not consider the detailed nature of localized excitations but instead define a correlation energy per electron factor that is unique to a specific atom. The correlation factors are basis function dependent and are determined by configuration interaction (CI) calculations on diatomic and hydride molecules. The correlation energy estimates are compared with the results of high-level CI calculations for a test set of 27 molecules representing a wide range of bonding environments (average error of 2.6%). An extension based on truncated CI calculations in which d-type and hydrogen p-type functions are eliminated from the virtual space combined with estimates of dynamical correlation contributions using atomic correlation factors is discussed and applied to the dissociation of several molecules.

Assessment of Initial Guesses for Self-Consistent Field Calculations. Superposition of Atomic Potentials: Simple yet Efficient

Electronic structure calculations, such as in the Hartree-Fock or Kohn-Sham density functional approach, require an initial guess for the molecular orbitals. The quality of the initial guess has a significant impact on the speed of convergence of the self-consistent field (SCF) procedure. Popular choices for the initial guess include the one-electron guess from the core Hamiltonian, the extended Hückel method, and the superposition of atomic densities (SAD). Here, we discuss alternative guesses obtained from the superposition of atomic potentials (SAP), which is easily implementable even in real-space calculations. We also discuss a variant of SAD which produces guess orbitals by purification of the density matrix that could also be used in real-space calculations, as well as a parameter-free variant of the extended Hückel method, which resembles the SAP method and is easy to implement on top of existing SAD infrastructure. The performance of the core Hamiltonian, the SAD, and the SAP guesses as well as the extended Hückel variant is assessed in nonrelativistic calculations on a data set of 259 molecules ranging from the first to the fourth periods by projecting the guess orbitals onto precomputed, converged SCF solutions in single- to triple-ζ basis sets. It is shown that the proposed SAP guess is the best guess on average. The extended Hückel guess offers a good alternative, with less scatter in accuracy.

Prediction of many-electron wavefunctions using atomic potentials

For a given many-electron molecule, it is possible to define a corresponding one-electron Schrödinger equation, using potentials derived from simple atomic densities, whose solution predicts fairly accurate molecular orbitals for single- and multi-determinant wavefunctions for the molecule. The energy is not predicted and must be evaluated by calculating Coulomb and exchange interactions over the predicted orbitals. Potentials are found by minimizing the energy of predicted wavefunctions. There exist slightly less accurate average potentials for first-row atoms that can be used without modification in different molecules. For a test set of molecules representing different bonding environments, these average potentials give wavefunctions with energies that deviate from exact self-consistent field or configuration interaction energies by less than 0.08 eV and 0.03 eV per bond or valence electron pair, respectively.