This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design.

In this work, we present a linear scaling formulation of the coupled-cluster singles and doubles with perturbative inclusion of triples (CCSD(T)) and explicitly correlated geminals. The linear scaling implementation of all post-mean-field steps utilizes the SparseMaps formalism [P. Pinski et al., J. Chem. Phys. 143, 034108 (2015)]. Even for conservative truncation levels, the method rapidly reaches near-linear complexity in realistic basis sets, e.g., an effective scaling exponent of 1.49 was obtained for n-alkanes with up to 200 carbon atoms in a def2-TZVP basis set. The robustness of the method is benchmarked against the massively parallel implementation of the conventional explicitly correlated coupled-cluster for a 20-water cluster; the total dissociation energy of the cluster (∼186 kcal/mol) is affected by the reduced scaling approximations by only ∼0.4 kcal/mol. The reduced scaling explicitly correlated CCSD(T) method is used to examine the binding energies of several systems in the L7 benchmark data set of noncovalent interactions.

In multicomponent quantum chemistry, more than one type of particle is treated quantum mechanically with either density functional theory or wave function based methods. In particular, the nuclear-electronic orbital (NEO) approach treats specified nuclei, typically hydrogen nuclei, on the same level as the electrons. This approach enables the incorporation of nuclear quantum effects, such as nuclear delocalization, anharmonicity, zero-point energy, and tunneling, as well as non-Born–Oppenheimer effects directly into quantum chemistry calculations. Such effects impact optimized geometries, molecular vibrational frequencies, reaction paths, isotope effects, and dynamical simulations. Multicomponent density functional theory (NEO-DFT) and time-dependent DFT (NEO-TDDFT) achieve an optimal balance between computational efficiency and accuracy for computing ground and excited state properties, respectively. Multicomponent wave function based methods, such as the coupled cluster singles and doubles (NEO-CCSD) method for ground states and the equation-of-motion counterpart (NEO-EOM-CCSD) for excited states, attain similar accuracy without requiring any parametrization and can be systematically improved but are more computationally expensive. Variants of the orbital-optimized perturbation theory (NEO-OOMP2) method achieve nearly the accuracy of NEO-CCSD for ground states with significantly lower computational cost. Additional approaches for computing excited electronic, vibrational, and vibronic states include the delta self-consistent field (NEO-ΔSCF), complete active space SCF (NEO-CASSCF), and nonorthogonal configuration interaction methods. Multireference methods are particularly important for describing hydrogen tunneling processes. Other types of multicomponent systems, such as those containing electrons and positrons, have also been studied within the NEO framework. The NEO approach allows the incorporation of nuclear quantum effects and non-Born–Oppenheimer effects for specified nuclei into quantum chemistry calculations in an accessible and computationally efficient manner.

We present a formulation of the explicitly correlated second-order Møller-Plesset (MP2-F12) energy in which all nontrivial post-mean-field steps are formulated with linear computational complexity in system size. The two key ideas are the use of pair-natural orbitals for compact representation of wave function amplitudes and the use of domain approximation to impose the block sparsity. This development utilizes the concepts for sparse representation of tensors described in the context of the domain based local pair-natural orbital-MP2 (DLPNO-MP2) method by us recently [Pinski et al., J. Chem. Phys. 143, 034108 (2015)]. Novel developments reported here include the use of domains not only for the projected atomic orbitals, but also for the complementary auxiliary basis set (CABS) used to approximate the three- and four-electron integrals of the F12 theory, and a simplification of the standard B intermediate of the F12 theory that avoids computation of four-index two-electron integrals that involve two CABS indices. For quasi-1-dimensional systems (n-alkanes), the ON DLPNO-MP2-F12 method becomes less expensive than the conventional ON(5) MP2-F12 for n between 10 and 15, for double- and triple-zeta basis sets; for the largest alkane, C200H402, in def2-TZVP basis, the observed computational complexity is N(∼1.6), largely due to the cubic cost of computing the mean-field operators. The method reproduces the canonical MP2-F12 energy with high precision: 99.9% of the canonical correlation energy is recovered with the default truncation parameters. Although its cost is significantly higher than that of DLPNO-MP2 method, the cost increase is compensated by the great reduction of the basis set error due to explicit correlation.

Proton transfer is ubiquitous in many fundamental chemical and biological processes, and the ability to modulate and control the proton transfer rate would have a major impact on numerous quantum technological advances. One possibility to modulate the reaction rate of proton transfer processes is given by exploiting the strong light-matter coupling of chemical systems inside optical or nanoplasmonic cavities. In this work, we investigate the proton transfer reactions in the prototype malonaldehyde and Z-3-amino-propenal (aminopropenal) molecules using different quantum electrodynamics methods, in particular, quantum electrodynamics coupled cluster theory and quantum electrodynamical density functional theory. Depending on the cavity mode polarization direction, we show that the optical cavity can increase the reaction energy barrier by 10–20% or decrease the reaction barrier by ∼5%. By using first-principles methods, this work establishes strong light-matter coupling as a viable and practical route to alter and catalyze proton transfer reactions.