Second order perturbation theory intermolecular interaction, electron

Yet another outstanding problem is the correct treatment of the interactions of small gap materials such as fullerenes. It is quite likely that second-order perturbation will not be adequate for such systems. Furthermore, the strong electron delocalization in these semi-conductor-like materials means that the standard atom-atom models of interaction fail due to their inherent assumption of locality (Misquitta et al. 2010). This is possibly the next hurdle to be faced by the theory of intermolecular interactions. 

In intermolecular perturbation theory one of the major problems concerns electron exchange between molecules. In the method described here exchange is limited to single electrons. This simplification is definitely a good approximation at large intermolecular distances. The energy of interaction between the molecules, AE (R), is obtained as a sum of first order, second order, and higher order contributions ... 

Chalasinski and Szczesniak have provided a means of decomposing the correlation contribution to the interaction energy into four separate terms. Their philosophy takes the electron exchange operator as a second perturbation in the spirit of many-body perturbation theory, with molecular interaction as the first perturbation in their intermolecular Mpller-Plesset perturbation theory (IMPPT). At the level of second order of the correlation operator, they obtain a number of separate terms. The first is the dispersion energy, e... 

Since the symmetry-adapted perturbation theory provides the basis for the understanding of weak intermolecular interactions, it is useful to discuss the convergence properties of the sapt expansion. High-order calculations performed for model one-electron (Hj) (30), two-electron (H2) (14, 15), and four-electron (He and He-Hz) (31) systems show that the sapt series converges rapidly. In fact, already the second-order calculation reproduces the exact variational interaction energies with errors smaller than 4%. Several recent applications strongly indicate that this optimistic result holds for larger systems as well. 

Electron correlation effects are known to be impx>rtant in systems with weak interactions. Studies of van der Waals interetctions have established the importance of using methods which scale linearly with the number of electrons[28] [29]. Of these methods, low-order many-body perturbation theory, in particular, second order theory, oflfers computational tractability combined with the ability to recover a significant firaction of the electron correlation energy. In the present work, second order many-body perturbation theory is used to account for correlation effects. Low order many-body perturbation theory has been used in accurate studies of intermolecular hydrogen bonding (see, for example, the work of Xantheas and Dunning[30]). 

This is not the place for a full overview of the wave function based post Hartree-Fock methods currently applied for the calculation of intermolecular interactions and in particular molecule/surface interactions. Table 3 contains a brief characterization of the most widely applied schemes. The two most popular methods are MP2 (second order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory), because it covers large part of electronic correlation at comparably low ex-... 

---