Configuration interaction many-body wavefunction

To obtain errors of 1 kcal/mol or better, it is essential to treat many-body effects accurately and, we believe, directly. Although commonly used methods such as the density functional theory within the local density approximation (LDA) or the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) may get some properties correctly, it seems unlikely that they, in general, will ever have the needed precision and robustness on a wide variety of molecules. On the other hand, methods that rely on a complete representation of the many-body wavefunction will require a computer time that is exponential in the number of electrons. A typical example of such an approach is the configuration interaction (Cl) method, which expands the wavefunction in Slater determinants of one-body orbitals. Each time an atom is added to the system, an additional number of molecular orbitals must be considered, and the total number of determinants to reach chemical accuracy is then multiplied by this factor. Hence an exponential dependence of the computer time on the number of atoms in the system results. 

Ground-State Energies from the ACSE with V, NY, and M 3-RDM Reconstructions Compared with the Energies from Several Wavefunction Methods, Including Hartree-Fock (HF), Second-Order Many-Body Perturbation Theory (MP2), Coupled-Cluster Singles-Doubles (CCSD), and Full Configuration Interaction (FCI), for Molecules in Valence Double-Zeta Basis Sets."... 

The second step of the calculation involves the treatment of dynamic correlation effects, which can be approached by many-body perturbation theory (62) or configuration interaction (63). Multireference coupled-cluster techniques have been developed (64—66) but they are computationally far more demanding and still not established as standard methods. At this point, we will only focus on configuration interaction approaches. What is done in these approaches is to regard the entire zeroth-order wavefunc-tion Tj) or its constituent parts double excitations relative to these reference functions. This produces a set of excited CSFs ( Q) that are used as expansion space for the configuration interaction (Cl) procedure. The resulting wavefunction may be written as... 

In this section we examine some of the critical ideas that contribute to most wavefunction-based models of electron correlation, including coupled cluster, configuration interaction, and many-body perturbation theory. We begin with the concept of the cluster function which may be used to include the effects of electron correlation in the wavefunction. Using a formalism in which the cluster functions are constructed by cluster operators acting on a reference determinant, we justify the use of the exponential ansatz of coupled cluster theory. ... 

There are two broad categories of methods that go beyond Hartree-Fock in constructing wavefunctions configuration interaction (Cl), and many-body perturbation theory. In Cl one begins by noting that the exact... 

In contrast to the four-body problem, real exponential wavefunctions in the interparticle coordinates led to readily evaluated integrals for three-body systems, and that fact was exploited in the context of extensive configuration interaction for adiabatic systems as long ago as 1977 by Thakkar and Smith [12]. Starting in 1987, this method was also applied to nonadiabatic systems by Petelenz and Smith [33,34], and to many adiabatic and nonadiabatic systems by Frolov, both alone [35,36] and in collaboration with Thakkar [37] and with Smith [38]. 

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