How delocalized are the polyacenes?

In an attempt to quantify electron delocalization in polyacenes with up to 50 carbon atoms, we have performed self-consistent field calculations in which the π electrons are constrained to occupy highly localized molecular orbitals (HILOs) centered on a maximum of two, six or ten adjacent carbon atoms. We have also performed similar calculations on simple polyacene analogs consisting only of hydrogen atoms and exhibiting electron delocalization in the σ framework. We find that the energetic cost of localizing the π electrons in the polyacenes is roughly 60, 5 or 0.1 kJ/mol per ring atom for the two-, six- and ten-atom HILOs, respectively, and the use of these localized models overestimates the predicted hydrogenation energies of the acenes by roughly 50%, 4% and 0.1%, respectively. We conclude that the chemistry of polyacenes can be modeled well using highly localized descriptions of the π electrons.

Economical Models for Electron Densities.

We discuss a new theoretical framework for modeling molecular electron densities. Our approach decomposes the total density into contributions from basis function products and then approximates each product using constrained least-squares approximation in a tailored local basis of functions with adjustable non-linear parameters. We show how to solve directly for the expansion coefficients and Lagrange multipliers and present an iterative method to optimize the non-linear parameters. Example products from the Dunning cc-pVTZ basis set are discussed.

Avoiding Negligible Shell Pairs and Quartets in Electronic Structure Calculations.

We define a significant shell pair in an electronic structure calculation as one that generates at least one two-electron integral larger than a preset threshold. We define a significant shell quartet similarly. We then explore several methods for identifying nonsignificant pairs and quartets so that they can be avoided and computational efficiency improved. We find that the widely used Cauchy-Schwarz bound identifies most nonsignificant quartets but that the Hölder bound is slightly more powerful for identifying nonsignificant pairs.

DFT exchange: sharing perspectives on the workhorse of quantum chemistry and materials science.

In this paper, the history, present status, and future of density-functional theory (DFT) is informally reviewed and discussed by 70 workers in the field, including molecular scientists, materials scientists, method developers and practitioners. The format of the paper is that of a roundtable discussion, in which the participants express and exchange views on DFT in the form of 302 individual contributions, formulated as responses to a preset list of 26 questions. Supported by a bibliography of 777 entries, the paper represents a broad snapshot of DFT, anno 2022.

Efficient Method for Calculating Effective Core Potential Integrals.

Effective core potential (ECP) integrals are among the most difficult one-electron integrals to calculate due to the projection operators. The radial part of these operators may include r0, r-1, and r-2 terms. For the r0 terms, we exploit a simple analytic expression for the fundamental projected integral to derive new recurrence relations and upper bounds for ECP integrals. For the r-1 and r-2 terms, we present a reconstruction method that replaces these terms by a sum of r0 terms and show that the resulting errors are chemically insignificant for a range of molecular properties. The new algorithm is available in Q-Chem 5.0 and is significantly faster than the ECP implementations in Q-Chem 4.4, GAMESS (US) and Dalton 2016.

Molecular electronic structure in one-dimensional Coulomb systems.

Following two recent papers [Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2015, 17, 3196; Mol. Phys., 2015, 113, 1843], we perform a larger-scale study of chemical structure in one dimension (1D). We identify a wide, and occasionally surprising, variety of stable 1D compounds (from diatomics to tetra-atomics) as well as a small collection of stable polymeric structures. We define the exclusion potential, a 1D analogue of the electrostatic potential, and show that it can be used to rationalise the nature of bonding within molecules. This allows us to construct a small set of simple rules which can predict whether a putative 1D molecule should be stable.

Chemistry in one dimension.

We report benchmark results for one-dimensional (1D) atomic and molecular systems interacting via the Coulomb operator |x|(-1). Using various wavefunction-type approaches, such as Hartree-Fock theory, second- and third-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory and explicitly correlated calculations, we study the ground state of atoms with up to ten electrons as well as small diatomic and triatomic molecules containing up to two electrons. A detailed analysis of the 1D helium-like ions is given and the expression of the high-density correlation energy is reported. We report the total energies, ionization energies, electron affinities and other physical properties of the many-electron 1D atoms and, using these results, we construct the 1D analog of Mendeleev's periodic table. We find that the 1D periodic table contains only two groups: the alkali metals and the noble gases. We also calculate the dissociation curves of several 1D diatomics and study the chemical bond in H2(+), HeH(2+), He2(3+), H2, HeH(+) and He2(2+). We find that, unlike their 3D counterparts, 1D molecules are primarily bound by one-electron bonds. Finally, we study the chemistry of H3(+) and we discuss the stability of the 1D polymer resulting from an infinite chain of hydrogen atoms.

Communication: Three-electron coalescence points in two and three dimensions.

The form of the wave function at three-electron coalescence points is examined for several spin states using an alternative method to the usual Fock expansion. We find that, in two- and three-dimensional systems, the non-analytical nature of the wave function is characterized by the appearance of logarithmic terms, reminiscent of those that appear as both electrons approach the nucleus of the helium atom. The explicit form of these singularities is given in terms of the interelectronic distances for a doublet and two quartet states of three electrons in a harmonic well.

Uniform electron gases. III. Low-density gases on three-dimensional spheres.

By combining variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and complete-basis-set limit Hartree-Fock (HF) calculations, we have obtained near-exact correlation energies for low-density same-spin electrons on a three-dimensional sphere (3-sphere), i.e., the surface of a four-dimensional ball. In the VMC calculations, we compare the efficacies of two types of one-electron basis functions for these strongly correlated systems and analyze the energy convergence with respect to the quality of the Jastrow factor. The HF calculations employ spherical Gaussian functions (SGFs) which are the curved-space analogs of Cartesian Gaussian functions. At low densities, the electrons become relatively localized into Wigner crystals, and the natural SGF centers are found by solving the Thomson problem (i.e., the minimum-energy arrangement of n point charges) on the 3-sphere for various values of n. We have found 11 special values of n whose Thomson sites are equivalent. Three of these are the vertices of four-dimensional Platonic solids - the hyper-tetrahedron (n = 5), the hyper-octahedron (n = 8), and the 24-cell (n = 24) - and a fourth is a highly symmetric structure (n = 13) which has not previously been reported. By calculating the harmonic frequencies of the electrons around their equilibrium positions, we also find the first-order vibrational corrections to the Thomson energy.

Basis functions for electronic structure calculations on spheres.

We introduce a new basis function (the spherical Gaussian) for electronic structure calculations on spheres of any dimension D. We find general expressions for the one- and two-electron integrals and propose an efficient computational algorithm incorporating the Cauchy-Schwarz bound. Using numerical calculations for the D = 2 case, we show that spherical Gaussians are more efficient than spherical harmonics when the electrons are strongly localized.

Communication: Hartree-Fock description of excited states of H2.

Hartree-Fock (HF) theory is most often applied to study the electronic ground states of molecular systems. However, with the advent of numerical techniques for locating higher solutions of the self-consistent field equations, it is now possible to examine the extent to which such mean-field solutions are useful approximations to electronic excited states. In this Communication, we use the maximum overlap method to locate 11 low-energy solutions of the HF equation for the H2 molecule and we find that, with only one exception, these yield surprisingly accurate models for the low-lying excited states of this molecule. This finding suggests that the HF solutions could be useful first-order approximations for correlated excited state wavefunctions.

Uniform electron gases. II. The generalized local density approximation in one dimension.

We introduce a generalization (gLDA) of the traditional Local Density Approximation (LDA) within density functional theory. The gLDA uses both the one-electron Seitz radius rs and a two-electron hole curvature parameter η at each point in space. The gLDA reduces to the LDA when applied to the infinite homogeneous electron gas but, unlike the LDA, it is also exact for finite uniform electron gases on spheres. We present an explicit gLDA functional for the correlation energy of electrons that are confined to a one-dimensional space and compare its accuracy with LDA, second- and third-order Møller-Plesset perturbation energies, and exact calculations for a variety of inhomogeneous systems.

Uniform electron gases. I. Electrons on a ring.

We introduce a new paradigm for one-dimensional uniform electron gases (UEGs). In this model, n electrons are confined to a ring and interact via a bare Coulomb operator. We use Rayleigh-Schrödinger perturbation theory to show that, in the high-density regime, the ground-state reduced (i.e., per electron) energy can be expanded as ε(r(s),n)=ε0(n)r(s)(-2)+ε1(n)r(s)(-1)+ε2(n)+ε3(n)r(s+)⋯ , where r(s) is the Seitz radius. We use strong-coupling perturbation theory and show that, in the low-density regime, the reduced energy can be expanded as ε(r(s),n)=η0(n)r(s)(-1)+η1(n)r(s)(-3/2)+η2(n)r(s)(-2)+⋯ . We report explicit expressions for ε0(n), ε1(n), ε2(n), ε3(n), η0(n), and η1(n) and derive the thermodynamic (large-n) limits of each of these. Finally, we perform numerical studies of UEGs with n = 2, 3, [ellipsis (horizontal)], 10, using Hylleraas-type and quantum Monte Carlo methods, and combine these with the perturbative results to obtain a picture of the behavior of the new model over the full range of n and r(s) values.

Exact wave functions of two-electron quantum rings.

We demonstrate that the Schrödinger equation for two electrons on a ring, which is the usual paradigm to model quantum rings, is solvable in closed form for particular values of the radius. We show that both polynomial and irrational solutions can be found for any value of the angular momentum and that the singlet and triplet manifolds, which are degenerate, have distinct geometric phases. We also study the nodal structure associated with these two-electron states.

Resolutions of the Coulomb operator. VI. Computation of auxiliary integrals.

We discuss the efficient computation of the auxiliary integrals that arise when resolutions of two-electron operators (specifically, the Coulomb operator [T. Limpanuparb, A. T. B. Gilbert, and P. M. W. Gill, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 7, 830 (2011)] and the long-range Ewald operator [T. Limpanuparb and P. M. W. Gill, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 7, 2353 (2011)]) are employed in quantum chemical calculations. We derive a recurrence relation that facilitates the generation of auxiliary integrals for Gaussian basis functions of arbitrary angular momentum and propose a near-optimal algorithm for its use.

Intracule functional models. V. Recurrence relations for two-electron integrals in position and momentum space.

The approach used by Ahlrichs [Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2006, 8, 3072] to derive the Obara-Saika recurrence relation (RR) for two-electron integrals over Gaussian basis functions, is used to derive an 18-term RR for six-dimensional integrals in phase space and 8-term RRs for three-dimensional integrals in position or momentum space. The 18-term RR reduces to a 5-term RR in the special cases of Dot and Posmom intracule integrals in Fourier space. We use these RRs to show explicitly how to construct Position, Momentum, Omega, Dot and Posmom intracule integrals recursively.

The two faces of static correlation.

Restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) and UHF wavefunctions for beryllium-like ions with nuclear charge 3 ≤ Z ≤ 5 are found using a near-complete Slater basis set. The triplet (RHF → UHF) instability and correlation energy are investigated as a function of Z and we find that the instability vanishes for Z > 4.5. We reproduce this surprising behavior using a minimal-basis model and, by comparing with the stretched H(2) molecule, conclude that "static" (also known as nondynamical, near-degeneracy, first-order, or strong) correlation comes in two flavors: one that can be captured by UHF and another that cannot. In the former (Type A), there is an "absolute near-degeneracy"; in the latter (Type B), there is a "relative near-degeneracy." This dichotomy clarifies discussions of static correlation effects.

Thinking outside the box: the uniform electron gas on a hypersphere.

We discuss alternative homogeneous electron gas systems in which a finite number n of electrons are confined to a D-dimensional sphere. We derive the first few terms of the high-density (r(s) → 0, where r(s) is the Seitz radius) energy expansions for these systems and show that, in the thermodynamic limit (n → ∞), these terms become identical to those of D-dimensional jellium.

Communication: A new approach to dual-basis second-order Møller-Plesset calculations.

We describe a hierarchy of approximations (MP2[x]) that allow one to estimate second-order Møller-Plesset (MP2) energies in a large basis set from small-basis calculations. The most cost-effective approximation, MP2[K], is significantly cheaper than full MP2 but numerical tests on small atoms and molecules indicate that it is nonetheless accurate. We conclude that MP2[K] is an attractive level of theory for large systems.