Accurately solving the electronic Schrödinger equation of small atoms and molecules using explicitly correlated (r12-)MR-CI. VIII. Valence excited states of methylene (CH2)

New ab Initio Potential Energy Surfaces for the Renner-Teller Coupled 11A′ and 11A′′ States of CH2

New ab initio potential energy surfaces (PESs) for the two lowest-lying singlet 11A′ and 11A′′ electronic states of CH2, coupled by the Renner-Teller (RT) effect and meant for the spectroscopic study, are presented. The surfaces are constructed using a dual-level strategy. The internally contracted multireference configuration interaction calculations with the Davidson correction, using the aug-cc-pVQZ basis set, are employed to obtain 3042 points at the lower level. The core and core-valence correlation effects are taken into account in the ab initio calculations with a modified optimized aug-cc-pCVQZ basis set for the higher-level points. The analytical representations of these PESs, with the inclusion of the nonadiabatic RT terms, are obtained by the nonlinear least-squares fit of the calculated points to three-body expansion. Quantum dynamical calculations are performed on these PESs, and the computed vibronic energy levels for the two singlet electronic states are in excellent agreement with experiment.

Spin-state splittings, highest-occupied-molecular-orbital and lowest-unoccupied-molecular-orbital energies, and chemical hardness

It is known that the exact density functional must give ground-state energies that are piecewise linear as a function of electron number. In this work we prove that this is also true for the lowest-energy excited states of different spin or spatial symmetry. This has three important consequences for chemical applications: the ground state of a molecule must correspond to the state with the maximum highest-occupied-molecular-orbital energy, minimum lowest-unoccupied-molecular-orbital energy, and maximum chemical hardness. The beryllium, carbon, and vanadium atoms, as well as the CH(2) and C(3)H(3) molecules are considered as illustrative examples. Our result also directly and rigorously connects the ionization potential and electron affinity to the stability of spin states.