The effect of local approximations in the ground-state coupled cluster wave function on electron affinities of large molecules

Abstract

A possibility to calculate electron affinities (EAs) by a software devised for electron excitations is exploited to examine the accuracy of a partly local EA-EOM-CCSD method. In the proposed approach local approximations are applied to the ground-state coupled cluster wave function, while the EAs themselves are obtained in a full configurational space. The results of a numerical test for 14 molecules show that already with standard local settings the method reproduces the nonlocal EAs with the average error of 0.009 eV. Since the EA-EOM step of the calculation requires less computational resources than the computation of the CCSD ground state, the proposed hybrid approach can become a valuable tool for obtaining the EAs for molecules, which are too large for a canonical CCSD calculation, but still small enough for the EA-EOM step to be performed in a nonlocal way.