ABSTRACT
We use selected configuration interaction with truncation energy error (SCI-TEE) and CI by parts (CIBP) to study the symmetric dissociation of the water molecule with Roos' triple-ζ double polarization basis set and with the Dunning cc-pVTZ basis. The calculations comprise CISDTQ (CI-4x) through CI-8x for H2O at its equilibrium geometry (Req) and up to fifteen times Req. With the Dunning basis our SCI-TEE-8x energies differ from full CI by less than 0.01 mHartree (0.006 kcal mol-1) at all O-H distances, representing the best upper bounds for this system outside Req. We compare our results with those of other relevant ab initio methods finding good agreement with recent DMRG calculations. The non-parallelity error (NPE) for SCI-TEE-6x remains stable below 0.1 mHartree when moving from the Roos to the Dunning orbitals. For the present system, CBS energy errors at the experimental equilibrium geometry and at dissociation can accurately be evaluated as the difference between non-relativistic total electronic energies taken from the literature, and our SCI-TEE-8x energies obtained with Dunning's or Roos' orbitals. In both cases, the difference between CBS energy errors at the equilibrium geometry and dissociation is not smaller than 10 mH, showing that chemically accurate NPE values do not guarantee a chemically accurate potential energy surface.
ABSTRACT
A priori selected configuration interaction (SCI) with truncation energy error [C. F. Bunge, J. Chem. Phys. 125, 014107 (2006)] and CI by parts [C. F. Bunge and R. Carbó-Dorca, J. Chem. Phys. 125, 014108 (2006)] are used to approximate the total nonrelativistic electronic ground state energy of water at fixed experimental geometry with CI up to sextuple excitations. Correlation-consistent polarized core-valence basis sets (cc-pCVnZ) up to sextuple zeta and augmented correlation-consistent polarized core-valence basis sets (aug-cc-pCVnZ) up to quintuple zeta quality are employed. Truncation energy errors range between less than 1 µhartree, and 100 µhartree for the largest orbital set. Coupled cluster CCSD and CCSD(T) calculations are also obtained for comparison. Our best upper bound, -76.4343 hartree, obtained by SCI with up to sextuple excitations with a cc-pCV6Z basis recovers more than 98.8% of the correlation energy of the system, and it is only about 3 kcal/mol above the "experimental" value. Despite that the present energy upper bounds are far below all previous ones, comparatively large dispersion errors in the determination of the extrapolated energies to the complete basis set do not allow to determine a reliable estimation of the full CI energy with an accuracy better than 0.6 mhartree (0.4 kcal/mol).
