HF method

Clearly, the HF method, independent of basis, systematically underestimates the bond lengdis over a broad percentage range. The CISD method is neither systematic nor narrowly distributed in its errors, but the MP2 and MP4 (but not MP3) methods are reasonably accurate and have narrow error distributions if valence TZ or QZ bases are used. The CCSD(T), but not the CCSD, method can be quite reliable if valence TZ or QZ bases are used. 

One of the limitations of HF calculations is that they do not include electron correlation. This means that HF takes into account the average affect of electron repulsion, but not the explicit electron-electron interaction. Within HF theory the probability of finding an electron at some location around an atom is determined by the distance from the nucleus but not the distance to the other electrons as shown in Figure 3.1. This is not physically true, but it is the consequence of the central field approximation, which defines the HF method. 

The disadvantage of ah initio methods is that they are expensive. These methods often take enormous amounts of computer CPU time, memory, and disk space. The HF method scales as N, where N is the number of basis functions. This means that a calculation twice as big takes 16 times as long (2" ) to complete. Correlated calculations often scale much worse than this. In practice, extremely accurate solutions are only obtainable when the molecule contains a dozen electrons or less. However, results with an accuracy rivaling that of many experimental techniques can be obtained for moderate-size organic molecules. The minimally correlated methods, such as MP2 and GVB, are often used when correlation is important to the description of large molecules. 

Whether DFT or HF methods are used, there are several issues regarding the details... 

Determine the effect of basis set on the predicted chemical shifts for benzene. Compute the NMR properties for both compounds at the B3LYP/6-31G(d) geometries we computed previously. Use the HF method for your NMR calculations, with whatever form(s) of the 6-31G basis set you deem appropriate. Compare your results to those of the HF/6-311+G(2d,p) job we ran in the earlier exercise. How does the basis set effect the accuracy of the computed chemical shift for benzene ... 

To construct the Fock matrix, eq. (3.51), integrals over all pairs of basis functions and the one-electron operator h are needed. For M basis functions there are of the order of of such one-electron integrals. These one-integrals are also known as core integrals, they describe the interaction of an electron with the whole frame of bare nuclei. The second part of the Fock matrix involves integrals over four basis functions and the g two-electron operator. There are of the order of of these two-electron integrals. In conventional HF methods the two-electron integrals are calculated and saved before the... 

Although direct methods for small and medium size systems require more CPU time than disk based methods, this is in many cases irrelevant. For the user the determining factor is the time from submitting the calculation to the results being available. Over the years the speed of CPUs has increased much faster than the speed of data transfer to and from disk. Many modem machines have quite slow data transfer to disk compared to CPU speed. Measured by the elapsed wall clock time, disk based HF methods are often the slowest in delivering the results, despite the fact that they require the least CPU time. 

The parameterization of MNDO/AM1/PM3 is performed by adjusting the constants involved in the different methods so that the results of HF calculations fit experimental data as closely as possible. This is in a sense wrong. We know that the HF method cannot give the correct result, even in the limit of an infinite basis set and without approximations. The HF results lack electron correlation, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, but the experimental data of course include such effects. This may be viewed as an advantage, the electron correlation effects are implicitly taken into account in the parameterization, and we need not perform complicated calculations to improve deficiencies in fhe HF procedure. However, it becomes problematic when the HF wave function cannot describe the system even qualitatively correctly, as for example with biradicals and excited states. Additional flexibility can be introduced in the trial wave function by adding more Slater determinants, for example by means of a Cl procedure (see Chapter 4 for details). But electron cori elation is then taken into account twice, once in the parameterization at the HF level, and once explicitly by the Cl calculation. 

The HF method determines the best one-determinant trial wave function (within the given basis set). It is therefore clear that in order to improve on HF results, the starting point must be a trial wave function which contains more than one Slater Determinant (SD). This also means that the mental picture of electrons residing in orbitals has to be abandoned, and the more fundamental property, the electron density, should be considered. As the HF solution usually gives 99% of the correct answer, electron correlation methods normally use the HF wave function as a starting point for improvements. 

This is perhaps the easiest method to understand. It is based on the variational principle (Appendix B), analogous to the HF method. The trial wave function is written as a linear combination of determinants with the expansion coefficients determined by requiring that the energy should be a minimum (or at least stationary), a procedure known as Configuration Interaction (Cl). The MOs used for building the excited Slater determinants are taken from a Hartree-Fock calculation and held fixed. Subscripts S, D, T etc. indicate determinants which are singly, doubly, triply etc. excited relative to the... 

The KS orbitals can be determined by a numerical procedure, analogous to numerical HF methods. In practice such procedures are limited to small systems, and essentially all calculations employ an expansion of the KS orbitals in an atomic basis set. 

In practice a DFT calculation involves an effort similar to that required for an HF calculation. Furthermore, DFT methods are one-dimensional just as HF methods are increasing the size of the basis set allows a better and better description of the KS orbitals. Since the DFT energy depends directly on the electron density, it is expected that it has basis set requirements similar to those for HF methods, i.e. close to converged with a TZ(2df) type basis. 

The harmonic frequencies calculated with different DFT functionals as a function of basis set are shown in Tables 11.17-11.19. The convergence as a function of basis set is similar to that observed for the HF method. The B3PW91 functional again shows the best performance. With the cc-pV5Z basis set the deviations from the experimental harmonic frequencies are only 0cm", 9 cm" and 17 cm", substantially better that the... 

The HF method overestimates the barrier for linearity by 0.73 kcal/mol, while MP2 underestimates it by 0.76 kcal/mol. Furthermore, the HF curve increase slightly too steeply for small bond angles. The MP4 result, however, is within a few tenths of a kcal/ mol of the exact result over the whole curve. Compared to the bond dissociation discussed above, it is clear that relative energies of conformations which have similar bonding are fairly easy to calculate. While the HF and MP4 total energies with the aug-cc-pVTZ basis are 260 kcal/mol and 85 kcal/mol higher than the exact values at the equilibrium geometry (Table 11.8), these errors are essentially constant over the whole surface. 

Although I have tried to keep each chapter as self-contained as possible, there are unavoidable dependencies. The part in Chapter 3 describing HF methods is prequisite for understanding Chapter 4. Both these chapters use terms and concepts for basis sets which are treated in Chapter 5. Chapter 5 in turn, relies on concepts in Chapters 3 and 4, i.e. these three chapters form the core for understanding modem electronic structure calculations. Many of the concepts in Chapters 3 and 4 are also used in Chapters 6, 7, 9,... 

For planar unsaturated and aromatic molecules, many MO calculations have been made by treating the a and n electrons separately. It is assumed that the o orbitals can be treated as localized bonds and the calculations involve only the tt electrons. The first such calculations were made by Hiickel such calculations are often called Hiickel molecular orbital (HMO) calculations Because electron-electron repulsions are either neglected or averaged out in the HMO method, another approach, the self-consistent field (SCF), or Hartree-Fock (HF), method, was devised. Although these methods give many useful results for planar unsaturated and aromatic molecules, they are often unsuccessful for other molecules it would obviously be better if all electrons, both a and it, could be included in the calculations. The development of modem computers has now made this possible. Many such calculations have been made" using a number of methods, among them an extension of the Hiickel method (EHMO) and the application of the SCF method to all valence electrons. ... 

A second attitude consists in projecting the symmetry-broken solution on to the appropriate symmetry-adapted subspace. The exact or approximate projected HF methods have been tire subject of an important litterature but the cost of the projections is non negligible compared to a Cl and they do not compare efficiently with the traditional avenue which consists in respecting the symmetry from the beginning and performing CL... 

In his pioneering work Baetzold used the Hartree-Fock (HF) method for quantum mechanical calculations for the cluster structure (the details are summarized in Reference 33). The value of the HF procedure is that it yields the best possible single-determinant wave function, which in turn should give correct values for expectation values of single-particle operators such as electric moments and... 

It is possible to construct a HF method for open-shell molecules that does maintain the proper spin symmetry. It is known as the restricted open-shell HF (ROHF) method. Rather than dividing the electrons into spin-up and spin-down classes, the ROHF method partitions the electrons into closed- and open-shell. In the easiest case of the high-spin wavefunction ( op = — electrons in op... 

In principle, the deficiencies of HF theory can be overcome by so-called correlated wavefunction or post-HF methods. In the majority of the available methods, the wavefunction is expanded in terms of many Slater-determinants instead of just one. One systematic recipe to choose such determinants is to perform single-, double-, triple-, etc. substitutions of occupied HF orbitals by virtual orbitals. Pictorially speaking, the electron correlation is implemented in this way by allowing the electrons to jump out of the HF sea into the virtual space in order... 

What does this mean We have replaced the non-local and therefore fairly complicated exchange term of Hartree-Fock theory as given in equation (3-3) by a simple approximate expression which depends only on the local values of the electron density. Thus, this expression represents a density functional for the exchange energy. As noted above, this formula was originally explicitly derived as an approximation to the HF scheme, without any reference to density functional theory. To improve the quality of this approximation an adjustable, semiempirical parameter a was introduced into the pre-factor Cx which leads to the Xa or Hartree-Fock-Slater (HFS) method which enjoyed a significant amount of popularity among physicists, but never had much impact in chemistry,... 

To understand how Kohn and Sham tackled this problem, we go back to the discussion of the Hartree-Fock scheme in Chapter 1. There, our wave function was a single Slater determinant SD constructed from N spin orbitals. While the Slater determinant enters the HF method as the approximation to the true N-electron wave function, we showed in Section 1.3 that 4>sd can also be looked upon as the exact wave function of a fictitious system of N non-interacting electrons (that is electrons which behave as uncharged fermions and therefore do not interact with each other via Coulomb repulsion), moving in the elfective potential VHF. For this type of wave function the kinetic energy can be exactly expressed as... 

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