Computing molecular correlation energies with guaranteed precision

Abstract

We present an approach to compute accurate correlation energies for atoms and molecules in the framework of multiresolution analysis (MRA), using an adaptive discontinuous multiresolution spectral-element representation for the six-dimensional (two-electron) pair function. The key features of our approach that make it feasible, namely (1) low-rank tensor approximations of functions and operators and (2) analytic elimination of operator singularities via explicit correlation, were retained from the previous work [F. A. Bischoff, R. J. Harrison, and E. F. Valeev, J. Chem. Phys. 137, 104103 (2012)]. Here we generalized the working equations to handle general (non-symmetric) many-electron systems at the MP2 level. The numerical performance is shown for the beryllium atom and the water molecule where literature data for the basis set limits could be reproduced to a few tens of μE(h). The key advantages of molecular MRA-MP2 are the absence of bias and arbitrariness in the choice of the basis set, high accuracy, and low scaling with respect to the system size.