Dalton is a powerful general-purpose program system for the study of molecular electronic structure at the Hartree–Fock, Kohn–Sham, multiconfigurational self-consistent-field, Møller–Plesset, configuration-interaction, and coupled-cluster levels of theory. Apart from the total energy, a wide variety of molecular properties may be calculated using these electronic-structure models. Molecular gradients and Hessians are available for geometry optimizations, molecular dynamics, and vibrational studies, whereas magnetic resonance and optical activity can be studied in a gauge-origin-invariant manner. Frequency-dependent molecular properties can be calculated using linear, quadratic, and cubic response theory. A large number of singlet and triplet perturbation operators are available for the study of one-, two-, and three-photon processes. Environmental effects may be included using various dielectric-medium and quantum-mechanics/molecular-mechanics models. Large molecules may be studied using linear-scaling and massively parallel algorithms. Dalton is distributed at no cost from http://www.daltonprogram.org for a number of UNIX platforms.

We describe an efficient implementation of the quadratic response function for a multiconfiguration self-consistent field reference wave function. The quadratic response function determines the hyperpolarizability and its residues determine the two-photon transition matrix elements and the transition matrix elements between excited states. We report sample calculations for the hyperpolarizability of Ne and for the two-photon transition matrix elements of Ne and H 2 .

Calculations of the dynamic dipole, quadrupole, and octopole polarizabilities of Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe are carried out using both time-dependent coupled Hartree–Fock and many-body perturbation theory methods. Dispersion coefficients are calculated for interactions involving these species. The dynamic polarizabilities are combined with previously published dynamic polarizabilities of H, He, H2, N2, HF, and CO to obtain dispersion coefficients for the interactions involving one of these species and one of Ne, Ar, Kr, or Xe. The dipole–dipole dispersion coefficients agree quite well with the best available semiempirical estimates. The isotropic higher multipole coefficients are in reasonable agreement with previous semiempirical estimates where available, and the anisotropic ones are, in most cases, the first reliable ones to appear in the literature. Nonadditive three-body dispersion coefficients for the Ne3, Ar3, Kr3, and Xe3 interactions are also calculated.

An improved simple model for the van der Waals potential based on universal damping functions for the dispersion coefficients

Static and frequency-dependent dipole polarizabilities α and first hyperpolarizabilities β are calculated for H2O using self-consistent field (SCF) and multiconfigurational self-consistent- field (MCSCF) linear and quadratic response theory. With an active orbital space where one correlating orbital is included for each occupied valence orbital excellent agreement is obtained with the experimental hyperpolarizability. Basis set dependency has been investigated and a detailed vibrational analysis has been carried out.