F12+EOM Quartic Force Fields for Rovibrational Predictions of Electronically Excited States

J Phys Chem A. 2023 Jun 8;127(22):4771-4779. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpca.3c00072. Epub 2023 May 26.

Abstract

Quartic force fields (QFFs) constructed using a sum of ground-state CCSD(T)-F12b energies with EOM-CCSD excitation energies are proposed for computation of spectroscopic properties of electronically excited states. This is dubbed the F12+EOM approach and is shown to provide similar accuracy to previous methodologies at lower computational cost. Using explicitly correlated F12 approaches instead of canonical CCSD(T), as in the corresponding (T)+EOM approach, allows for 70-fold improvement in computational time. The mean percent difference between the two methods for anharmonic vibrational frequencies is only 0.10%. A similar approach is also developed herein which accounts for core correlation and scalar relativistic effects, named F12cCR+EOM. The F12+EOM and F12cCR+EOM approaches both match to within 2.5% mean absolute error of experimental fundamental frequencies. These new methods should help in clarifying astronomical spectra by assigning features to vibronic and vibrational transitions of small astromolecules when such data are not available experimentally.