First fullyab initiopotential energy surface of methane with a spectroscopic accuracy

Abstract

Full 9-dimensional ab initio potential energy surfaces for the methane molecule are constructed using extended electronic structure coupled-cluster calculations with various series of basis sets following increasing X cardinal numbers: cc-pVXZ (X = 3, 4, 5, 6), aug-cc-ACVXZ (X = 3, 4, 5), and cc-pCVXZ-F12 (X = 3, 4). High-order dynamic electron correlations including triple and quadrupole excitations as well as relativistic and diagonal Born-Oppenheimer breakdown corrections were accounted for. Analytical potential functions are parametrized as non-polynomial expansions in internal coordinates in irreducible tensor representation. Vibrational energy levels are reported using global variational nuclear motion calculations with exact kinetic energy operator and a full account of the tetrahedral symmetry of CH4. Our best ab initio surface including above-mentioned contributions provides the rms (obs.-calc.) errors of less than 0.11 cm−1 for vibrational band centers below 4700 cm−1, and ∼0.3 cm−1 for all 229 assigned experimentally determined vibrational levels up to the Icosad range <7900 cm−1 without empirically adjusted parameters. These results improve the accuracy of ab initio methane vibrational predictions by more than an order of magnitude with respect to previous works. This is an unprecedented accuracy of first-principles calculations of a five-atomic molecule for such a large data set. New ab initio potential results in significantly better band center predictions even in comparison with best available empirically corrected potential energy surfaces. The issues related to the basis set extrapolation and an additivity of various corrections at this level of accuracy are discussed.