The van der Waals interactions in rare-gas dimers: the role of interparticle interactions.

We investigate the potential energy curves of rare-gas dimers with various ranges and strengths of interparticle interactions (nuclear-electron, electron-electron, and nuclear-nuclear interactions). Our investigation is based on the highly accurate coupled-cluster theory associated with those interparticle interactions. For comparison, the performances of the corresponding Hartree-Fock theory, second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory, and density functional theory are also investigated. Our results reveal that when the interparticle interactions retain the long-range Coulomb tails, the nature of van der Waals interactions in the rare-gas dimers remains similar. By contrast, when the interparticle interactions are sufficiently short-range, the conventional van der Waals interactions in the rare-gas dimers completely disappear, yielding purely repulsive potential energy curves.

SCAN-based hybrid and double-hybrid density functionals from models without fitted parameters.

By incorporating the nonempirical strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) semilocal density functional [J. Sun, A. Ruzsinszky, and J. P. Perdew, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 036402 (2015)] in the underlying expression of four existing hybrid and double-hybrid models, we propose one hybrid (SCAN0) and three double-hybrid (SCAN0-DH, SCAN-QIDH, and SCAN0-2) density functionals, which are free from any fitted parameters. The SCAN-based double-hybrid functionals consistently outperform their parent SCAN semilocal functional for self-interaction problems and noncovalent interactions. In particular, SCAN0-2, which includes about 79% of Hartree-Fock exchange and 50% of second-order Møller-Plesset correlation, is shown to be reliably accurate for a very diverse range of applications, such as thermochemistry, kinetics, noncovalent interactions, and self-interaction problems.

Short- and long-range corrected hybrid density functionals with the D3 dispersion corrections.

We propose a short- and long-range corrected (SLC) hybrid scheme employing 100% Hartree-Fock exchange at both zero and infinite interelectronic distances, wherein three SLC hybrid density functionals with the D3 dispersion corrections (SLC-LDA-D3, SLC-PBE-D3, and SLC-B97-D3) are developed. SLC-PBE-D3 and SLC-B97-D3 are shown to be accurate for a very diverse range of applications, such as core ionization and excitation energies, thermochemistry, kinetics, noncovalent interactions, dissociation of symmetric radical cations, vertical ionization potentials, vertical electron affinities, fundamental gaps, and valence, Rydberg, and long-range charge-transfer excitation energies. Relative to ωB97X-D, SLC-B97-D3 provides significant improvement for core ionization and excitation energies and noticeable improvement for the self-interaction, asymptote, energy-gap, and charge-transfer problems, while performing similarly for thermochemistry, kinetics, and noncovalent interactions.