The newly developed back transformed pair natural orbital based similarity transformed equation of motion (bt-STEOM) method at the coupled cluster singles and doubles level (CCSD) is combined with an appropriate modification of our earlier active space selection scheme for STEOM. The resulting method is benchmarked for valence, Rydberg, and charge transfer excited states of Thiel's test set and other test systems. The bt-PNO-STEOM-CCSD method gives very similar results to canonical STEOM-CCSD for both singlet and triplet excited states. It performs in a balanced manner for all these types of excited states, while the EOM-CCSD method performs especially well for Rydberg excited states and the CC2 method excels at obtaining accurate results for valence excited states. Both EOM-CCSD and CC2 perform worse than bt-PNO-STEOM-CCSD for charge transfer states for the test cases studied.

The use of back-transformed pair natural orbitals in the calculation of excited state energies, ionization potentials, and electron affinities is investigated within the framework of equation of motion coupled cluster theory and its similarity transformed variant. Possible approaches to a more optimal use of pair natural orbitals in these methods are indicated.

This work describes a domain-based local pair natural orbital (DLPNO) implementation of the equation of motion coupled cluster method for the computation of electron affinities (EAs) including single and double excitations. Similar to our earlier work on ionization potentials (IPs), the method reported in this study uses the ground state DLPNO framework and extends it to the electron attachment problem. While full linear scaling could not be achieved as in the IP case, leaving the Fock/Koopmans’ contributions in the canonical basis and using a tighter threshold for singles PNOs allows us to compute accurate EAs and retain most of the efficiency of the DLPNO technique. Thus as in the IP case, the ground state truncation parameters are sufficient to control the accuracy of the computed EA values, although a new set of integrals for singles PNOs must be generated at the DLPNO integral transformation step. Using standard settings, our method reproduces the canonical results with a maximum absolute deviation of 49 meV for bound states of a test set of 24 molecules. Using the same settings, a calculation involving more than 4500 basis functions, including diffuse functions, takes four days on four cores, with only 48 min spent in the EA module itself.

An efficient scheme for the automatic selection of an active space for similarity transformed equations of motion (STEOM) coupled cluster method is proposed. It relies on state averaged configuration interaction singles (CIS) natural orbitals and makes it possible to use STEOM as a black box method. The performance of the new scheme is tested for singlet and triplet valence, charge transfer, and Rydberg excited states.

In the present paper, the chain of spheres exchange (COSX) approximation is applied to the highest scaling terms in the equation of motion (EOM) coupled cluster equations with single and double excitations, in particular, the terms involving integrals with four virtual labels. It is found that even the acceleration of this single term yields significant computational gains without compromising the desired accuracy of the method. For an excitation energy calculation on a cluster of five water molecules using 585 basis functions, the four virtual term is 9.4 times faster using COSX with a loose grid than using the canonical implementation, which yields a 2.6 fold acceleration for the whole of the EOM calculation. For electron attachment calculations, the four virtual term is 15 times and the total EOM calculation is 10 times faster than the canonical calculation for the same system. The accuracy of the new method was tested using Thiel's test set for excited states using the same settings and the maximum absolute deviation over the whole test set was found to be 12.945 cm(-1) (59 μHartree) for excitation energies and 6.799 cm(-1) (31 μHartree) for electron attachments. Using MP2 amplitudes for the ground state in combination with the parallel evaluation of the full EOM equations in the manner discussed in this paper enabled us to perform calculations for large systems. Electron affinity values for the two lowest states of a Zn protoporphyrine model compound (224 correlated electrons and 1120 basis functions) were obtained in 3 days 19 h using 4 cores of a Xeon E5-2670 processor allocating 10 GB memory per core. Calculating the lowest two excitation energies for trans-retinal (114 correlated electrons and 539 basis functions) took 1 day 21 h using eight cores of the same processor and identical memory allocation per core.

We have investigated the electron-attached states in Watson−Crick guanine−cytosine and adenine− thymine base pairs using the highly accurate equation-ofmotion coupled-cluster (EOM-CC) method and extended basis sets. Both base pairs have two bound anionic states. The dipole-bound state is stable even at the neutral geometry, but the valence-bound state is only adiabatically bound. The initial electron attachment results in the formation of a dipole-bound state that acts as a doorway to the valence-bound anionic state. The adiabatic potential energy surface of ground and first excited states of an anion shows an avoided crossing, indicating mixing of the electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom. We have calculated the coupling strength between the valence-and dipole-bound states by fitting a simple diabatic model potential to a cut through the two adiabatic surfaces of the anions obtained from the EOM-CC calculations. The transfer of the electron from the initial dipole-bound to the final valence-bound state has been found to happen at an ultrafast time scale.

In this work, a domain-based local pair natural orbital (DLPNO) version of the equation of motion coupled cluster theory with single and double excitations for ionization potentials (IP-EOM-CCSD) equations has been formulated and implemented. The method uses ground state localized occupied and pair natural virtual orbitals and applies the DLPNO machinery to arrive at a linear scaling implementation of the IP-EOM-CCSD method. The accuracy of the method is controllable using ground state truncation parameters. Using default thresholds, the method predicts ionization potential (IP) values with good accuracy (mean absolute error of 0.08 eV). We demonstrate that our code can be used to compute IP values for systems with more than 1000 atoms and 10 000 basis functions.

We have investigated the electron attachment dynamics of uracil in water using accurate wavefunction and QM/MM methods. The initial electron attached state is found to be localized on the water and mixing of electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom leads to the transfer of electron from the water to the uracil. The water molecules around the uracil stabilize the uracil bound anion by creating an extensive hydrogen-bonding network. The presence of the bulk water environment accelerates the rate of electron attachment to uracil and the complete electron transfer from water to the uracil happens at a picosecond time scale. The degree of solvation of the aqueous electron can lead to a difference in the initial stabilization of the uracil bound anion but at a longer time scale the anion formed due to the attachment of both surface-bound and bulk solvated electrons behaves similarly.