Correlation Energy from the Adiabatic Connection Formalism for Complete Active Space Wave Functions

Abstract

Recently, the adiabatic connection (AC) formula for the electron correlation energy has been proposed for a broad class of multireference wave functions (Pernal, K. Electron Correlation from the Adiabatic Connection for Multireference Wave Functions. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2018, 120, 013001). We show that the AC formula used together with the extended random phase approximation (ERPA) can be efficiently applied to complete active space (CAS) wave functions to recover the remaining electron correlation. Unlike most of the perturbation theory approaches, the proposed AC-CAS method does not require construction of higher than two-electron reduced density matrices, which offers an immediate computational saving. In addition, we show that typically the AC-CAS systematically reduces the errors of both the absolute value of energy and of the energy differences (energy barrier) upon enlarging active spaces for electrons and orbitals. AC-CAS consistently gains in accuracy from including more active electrons. We also propose and study that the performance of the AC0 approach resulting from the first-order expansion of the AC integrand at the coupling constant equal to 0. AC0 avoids solving the full ERPA eigenequation, replacing it with small-dimension eigenproblems, while retaining good accuracy of the AC-CAS method. Low computational cost, compared to AC-CAS or perturbational approaches, makes AC0 the most efficient ab initio approach to capturing electron correlation for the CAS wave functions.