We report on the findings of a blind challenge devoted to determining the frozencore, full configuration interaction (FCI) ground state energy of the benzene molecule in a standard correlation-consistent basis set of double-ζ quality. As a broad international endeavour, our suite of wave function-based correlation methods collectively represents a diverse view of the high-accuracy repertoire offered by modern electronic structure theory. In our assessment, the evaluated high-level methods are all found to qualitatively agree on a final correlation energy, with most methods yielding an estimate of the FCI value around −863 mE H. However, we find the root-mean-square deviation of the energies from the studied methods to be considerable (1.3 mE H), which in light of the acclaimed performance of each of the methods for smaller molecular systems clearly displays the challenges faced in extending reliable, near-exact correlation methods to larger systems. While the discrepancies exposed by our study thus emphasize the fact that the current state-of-the-art approaches leave room for improvement, we still expect the present assessment to provide a valuable community resource for benchmark and calibration purposes going forward.

A large collaboration carefully benchmarks 20 first principles many-body electronic structure methods on a test set of 7 transition metal atoms, and their ions and monoxides. Good agreement is attained between 3 systematically converged methods, resulting in experiment-free reference values.These reference values are used to assess the accuracy of modern emerging and scalable approaches to the many-electron problem. The most accurate methods obtain energies indistinguishable from experimental results, with the agreement mainly limited by the experimental uncertainties. Comparison between methods enables a unique perspective on calculations of many-body systems of electrons.

We describe a method for computing near-exact energies for correlated systems with large Hilbert spaces. The method efficiently identifies the most important states and performs a variational calculation in that space. A semistochastic approach is then used to add a perturbative correction to the variational energy to compute the total energy. The size of the variational space is progressively increased until the total energy converges to within the desired tolerance. We demonstrate the utility of the method by computing a near-exact potential energy curve (PEC) for a very challenging molecule -the chromium dimer.

The recently developed semistochastic heat-bath configuration interaction (SHCI) method is a systematically improvable selected configuration interaction plus perturbation theory method capable of giving essentially exact energies for larger systems than is possible with other such methods. We compute SHCI atomization energies for 55 molecules that have been used as a test set in prior studies because their atomization energies are known from experiment. Basis sets from cc-pVDZ to cc-pV5Z are used, totaling up to 500 orbitals and a Hilbert space of 1032 Slater determinants for the largest molecules. For each basis, an extrapolated energy well within chemical accuracy (1 kcal/mol or 1.6 mHa/mol) of the exact energy for that basis is computed using only a tiny fraction of the entire Hilbert space. We also use our almost exact energies to benchmark energies from the coupled cluster method with single, double, and perturbative triple excitations. The energies are extrapolated to the complete basis set limit and compared to the experimental atomization energies. The extrapolations are done both without and with a basis-set correction based on density-functional theory. The mean absolute deviations from experiment for these extrapolations are 0.46 kcal/mol and 0.51 kcal/mol, respectively. Orbital optimization methods used to obtain improved convergence of the SHCI energies are also discussed.

Recent developments in twisted bilayer graphene revealed a rich phase space of mismatched van der Waals systems and generated excitement. Expanding the scope to hetero-bilayers can offer new opportunities to control van der Waals systems with strong in-plane correlations such as spin-orbit assisted Mott insulator α-RuCl3. Nevertheless, a theoretical ab-initio framework for mismatched hetero-bilayers without even approximate periodicity is sorely lacking. We propose a general strategy for calculating electronic properties of such systems, "Mismatched INterface Theory" (MINT), and apply it to the graphene/α-RuCl3 (g/α-RuCl3) heterostructure. Using MINT, we predict uniform doping of 4.7% from graphene to α-RuCl3 and magnetic interactions in α-RuCl3 to shift the system towards the Kitaev point. Hence we demonstrate that MINT can guide targeted materialization of desired model systems and discuss recent experiments on g/α-RuCl3 heterostructure by Zhou et al. 1 .