Triplet excitation energies from multiconfigurational short-range density-functional theory response calculations

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.

A new framework for frequency-dependent polarizable force fields

A frequency-dependent extension of the polarizable force field "Atom-Condensed Kohn-Sham density functional theory approximated to the second-order" (ACKS2) [Verstraelen et al., J. Chem. Phys. 141, 194114 (2014)] is proposed, referred to as ACKS2ω. The method enables theoretical predictions of dynamical response properties of finite systems after partitioning of the frequency-dependent molecular response function. Parameters in this model are computed simply as expectation values of an electronic wavefunction, and the hardness matrix is entirely reused from ACKS2 as an adiabatic approximation is used. A numerical validation shows that accurate models can already be obtained with atomic monopoles and dipoles. Absorption spectra of 42 organic and inorganic molecular monomers are evaluated using ACKS2ω, and our results agree well with the time-dependent DFT calculations. Also for the calculation of C₆ dispersion coefficients, ACKS2ω closely reproduces its TDDFT reference. When parameters for ACKS2ω are derived from a PBE/aug-cc-pVDZ ground state, it reproduces experimental values for 903 organic and inorganic intermolecular pairs with an MAPE of 3.84%. Our results confirm that ACKS2ω offers a solid connection between the quantum-mechanical description of frequency-dependent response and computationally efficient force-field models.

An efficient implementation of time-dependent linear-response theory for strongly orthogonal geminal wave function models

We present an implementation of time-dependent linear-response equations for strongly orthogonal geminal wave function models: the generalized valence bond perfect-pairing theory (TD-GVB) and the antisymmetrized product of strongly orthogonal geminals (TD-APSG). The geminal wave functions are optimized using a restricted-step second-order algorithm suitable for handling many geminals, and the linear-response equations are solved in an efficient way using a direct iterative approach. The wave function optimization algorithm features an original scheme to create initial orbitals for the geminal functions in a black-box fashion. The implementation is employed to examine the accuracy of the geminal linear response for singlet excitation energies of small and medium-sized molecules. In systems dominated by dynamic correlation, geminal models constitute only a minor improvement with respect to time-dependent Hartree-Fock. Compared to linear-response complete active space self-consistent field (LR-CASSCF), TD-GVB either misses or gives large errors for states dominated by double excitations.

Multi-configurational short-range density functional theory can describe spin-spin coupling constants of transition metal complexes

The multi-configurational short-range (sr) density functional theory has been extended to the calculation of indirect spin-spin coupling constants (SSCCs) for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The performance of the new method is compared to Kohn-Sham density functional theory and the ab initio complete active space self-consistent field for a selected set of molecules with good reference values. Two density functionals have been considered, the local density approximation srLDA and srPBE from the GGA class of functionals. All srDFT calculations are of Hartree-Fock-type HF-srDFT or complete active space-type CAS-srDFT. In all cases, the calculated SSCC values are of the same quality for srLDA and srPBE functionals, suggesting that one should use the computationally cost-effective srLDA functionals in applications. For all the calculated SSCCs in organic compounds, the best choice is HF-srDFT; the more expensive CAS-srDFT does not provide better values for these single-reference molecules. Fluorine is a challenge; in particular, the FF, FC, and FO couplings have much higher statistical errors than the rest. For SSCCs involving fluorine and a metal atom CAS-srDFT with singlet, generalized Tamm-Dancoff approximation is needed to get good SSCC values although the reference ground state is not a multi-reference case. For VF₆ ^-1, all other considered models fail blatantly.

Dalton Project: A Python platform for molecular- and electronic-structure simulations of complex systems

The Dalton Project provides a uniform platform access to the underlying full-fledged quantum chemistry codes Dalton and LSDalton as well as the PyFraME package for automatized fragmentation and parameterization of complex molecular environments. The platform is written in Python and defines a means for library communication and interaction. Intermediate data such as integrals are exposed to the platform and made accessible to the user in the form of NumPy arrays, and the resulting data are extracted, analyzed, and visualized. Complex computational protocols that may, for instance, arise due to a need for environment fragmentation and configuration-space sampling of biochemical systems are readily assisted by the platform. The platform is designed to host additional software libraries and will serve as a hub for future modular software development efforts in the distributed Dalton community.