Analysis of different sets of spin-adapted substitution operators in open-shell coupled cluster theory

Abstract

In spin-adapted open-shell coupled cluster (CC) theory, the choice of spin-free spatial substitution operators is generally not unique. Due to an increasing linear dependence of the cluster operator (with increasing substitution level), the options to span identical linear spaces increase rapidly. In this work, several sets of non-orthogonal as well as orthogonal spin-adapted substitution operators are generated and used in consecutive configuration interaction (CI) and CC calculations. All (full) operator sets were generated to span the same linear space. The results are analysed in terms of the produced wave function quality and the amount of recovered correlation energy w.r.t. full CI (FCI). In particular, the influence of different amounts of spectators, orthogonality as well as spin incompleteness was investigated. It was found that CC calculations involving fewer spectators lead to more accurate results in general. Here, correlation energy differences of up to 0.32% for minimal to maximal spectating sets were obtained. As expected, all conducted calculations led to identical results for non-orthogonal and orthogonal operator sets. Spin completeness was found to be of great importance. Spin-incomplete cluster operators led to significant errors in both the correlation energies and the FCI overlap.