Engineering topics
Pastorczak, Ewa
Publications and source records attributed to Pastorczak, Ewa.
A minimalistic approach to static and dynamic electron correlations: Amending generalized valence bond method with extended random phase approximation correlation correction
A perfect-pairing generalized valence bond (GVB) approximation is known to be one of the simplest approximations, which allows one to capture the essence of static correlation in molecular systems. In spite of its attractive feature of being relatively computationally efficient, this approximation misses a large portion of dynamic correlation and does not offer sufficient accuracy to be generally useful for studying electronic structure of molecules. We propose to correct the GVB model and alleviate some of its deficiencies by amending it with the correlation energy correction derived from the recently formulated extended random phase approximation (ERPA). On the examples of systems of diverse electronic structures, we show that the resulting ERPA-GVB method greatly improves upon the GVB model. ERPA-GVB recovers most of the electron correlation and it yields energy barrier heights of excellent accuracy. Thanks to a balanced treatment of static and dynamic correlation, ERPA-GVB stays reliable when one moves from systems dominated by dynamic electron correlation to those for which the static correlation comes into play.
Intramolecular symmetry-adapted perturbation theory with a single-determinant wavefunction
We introduce an intramolecular energy decomposition scheme for analyzing non-covalent interactions within molecules in the spirit of symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT). The proposed intra-SAPT approach is based upon the Chemical Hamiltonian of Mayer [Int. J. Quantum Chem. 23(2), 341–363 (1983)] and the recently introduced zeroth-order wavefunction [J. F. Gonthier and C. Corminboeuf, J. Chem. Phys. 140(15), 154107 (2014)]. The scheme decomposes the interaction energy between weakly bound fragments located within the same molecule into physically meaningful components, i.e., electrostatic-exchange, induction, and dispersion. Here, we discuss the key steps of the approach and demonstrate that a single-determinant wavefunction can already deliver a detailed and insightful description of a wide range of intramolecular non-covalent phenomena such as hydrogen bonds, dihydrogen contacts, and π − π stacking interactions. Intra-SAPT is also used to shed the light on competing intra- and intermolecular interactions.
Ensemble density variational methods with self- and ghost-interaction-corrected functionals
Ensemble density functional theory (DFT) offers a way of predicting excited-states energies of atomic and molecular systems without referring to a density response function. Despite a significant theoretical work, practical applications of the proposed approximations have been scarce and they do not allow for a fair judgement of the potential usefulness of ensemble DFT with available functionals. In the paper, we investigate two forms of ensemble density functionals formulated within ensemble DFT framework: the Gross, Oliveira, and Kohn (GOK) functional proposed by Gross et al. [Phys. Rev. A 37, 2809 (1988)] alongside the orbital-dependent eDFT form of the functional introduced by Nagy [J. Phys. B 34, 2363 (2001)] (the acronym eDFT proposed in analogy to eHF – ensemble Hartree-Fock method). Local and semi-local ground-state density functionals are employed in both approaches. Approximate ensemble density functionals contain not only spurious self-interaction but also the so-called ghost-interaction which has no counterpart in the ground-state DFT. We propose how to correct the GOK functional for both kinds of interactions in approximations that go beyond the exact-exchange functional. Numerical applications lead to a conclusion that functionals free of the ghost-interaction by construction, i.e., eDFT, yield much more reliable results than approximate self- and ghost-interaction-corrected GOK functional. Additionally, local density functional corrected for self-interaction employed in the eDFT framework yields excitations energies of the accuracy comparable to that of the uncorrected semi-local eDFT functional.