Accurate and affordable methods to characterize the electronic structure of solids are important for targeted materials design. Embedding-based methods provide an appealing balance in the trade-off between cost and accuracy -particularly when studying localized phenomena. Here, we use the density matrix embedding theory (DMET) algorithm to study the electronic excitations in solid-state defects with a

The adsorption of simple gas molecules to metal oxide surfaces is a primary step in many heterogeneous catalysis applications. Quantum chemical modeling of these reactions is a challenge in terms of both cost and accuracy, and quantum-embedding methods are promising, especially for localized chemical phenomena. In this work, we employ density matrix embedding theory (DMET) for periodic systems to calculate the adsorption energy of CO to the MgO(001) surface. Using coupled-cluster theory with single and double excitations and second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation theory as quantum chemical solvers, we perform calculations with embedding clusters up to 266 electrons in 306 orbitals, with the largest embedding models agreeing to within 1.2 kcal/mol of the non-embedding references. Moreover, we present a memory-efficient procedure of storing and manipulating electron repulsion integrals in the embedding space within the framework of periodic DMET.

Accurate and affordable methods to characterize the electronic structure of solids are important for targeted materials design. Embedding-based methods provide an appealing balance in the trade-off between cost and accuracy - particularly when studying localized phenomena. Here, we use the density matrix embedding theory (DMET) algorithm to study the electronic excitations in solid-state defects with a restricted open-shell Hartree--Fock (ROHF) bath and multireference impurity solvers, specifically, complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF) and n-electron valence state second-order perturbation theory (NEVPT2). We apply the method to investigate an oxygen vacancy (OV) on a MgO(100) surface and find absolute deviations within 0.05 eV between DMET using the CASSCF/NEVPT2 solver, denoted as CAS-DMET/NEVPT2-DMET, and the non-embedded CASSCF/NEVPT2 approach. Next, we establish the practicality of DMET by extending it to larger supercells for the OV defect and a neutral silicon-vacancy in diamond where the use of non-embedded CASSCF/NEVPT2 is extremely expensive.

We investigate the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond using periodic density matrix embedding theory (pDMET). To describe the strongly correlated excited states of this system, the complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF) followed by n-electron valence state second-order perturbation theory (NEVPT2) was used as the impurity solver. Since the NEVPT2-DMET energies show a linear dependence on the inverse of the size of the embedding subspace, we performed an extrapolation of the excitation energies to the nonembedding limit using a linear regression. The extrapolated NEVPT2-DMET first triplet–triplet excitation energy is 2.31 eV and that for the optically inactive singlet–singlet transition is 1.02 eV, both in agreement with the experimentally observed vertical excitation energies of ∼2.18 eV and ∼1.26 eV, respectively. This is the first application of pDMET to a charged periodic system and the first investigation of the NV– defect using NEVPT2 for periodic supercell models.

Understanding direct metal–metal bonding between actinide atoms has been an elusive goal in chemistry for years. We report for the first time the anion photoelectron spectrum of U2 –. The threshold of the lowest electron binding energy (EBE) spectral band occurs at 1.0 eV, which corresponds to the electron affinity (EA) of U2, whereas the vertical detachment energy of U2 – is found at EBE ∼ 1.2 eV. Electronic structure calculations on U2 and U2 – were carried out with state-of-the-art theoretical methods. The computed values of EA­(U2) and EA­(U) and the difference between the computed dissociation energies of U2 and U2 – are found to be internally consistent and consistent with experiment. Analysis of the bonds in U2 and U2 – shows that while U2 has a formal quintuple bond, U2 – has a quadruple bond, even if the effective bond orders differ only by 0.5 unit instead of one unit. The resulting experimental-computational synergy elucidates the nature of metal–metal bonding in U2 and U2 –.