An up-to-date overview of the CFOUR program system is given. After providing a brief outline of the evolution of the program since its inception in 1989, a comprehensive presentation is given of its well-known capabilities for high-level coupled-cluster theory and its application to molecular properties. Subsequent to this generally well-known background information, much of the remaining content focuses on lesser-known capabilities of CFOUR, most of which have become available to the public only recently or will become available in the near future. Each of these new features is illustrated by a representative example, with additional discussion targeted to educating users as to classes of applications that are now enabled by these capabilities. Finally, some speculation about future directions is given, and the mode of distribution and support for CFOUR are outlined in the appendix.
We describe our efforts of the past few years to create a large set of more than 500 highly accurate vertical excitation energies of various natures (π → π*, n → π*, double excitation, Rydberg, singlet, doublet, triplet, etc.) in small‐ and medium‐sized molecules. These values have been obtained using an incremental strategy which consists in combining high‐order coupled cluster and selected configuration interaction calculations using increasingly large diffuse basis sets in order to reach high accuracy. One of the key aspects of the so‐called QUEST database of vertical excitations is that it does not rely on any experimental values, avoiding potential biases inherently linked to experiments and facilitating theoretical cross comparisons. Following this composite protocol, we have been able to produce theoretical best estimates (TBEs) with the aug‐cc‐pVTZ basis set for each of these transitions, as well as basis set corrected TBEs (i.e., near the complete basis set limit) for some of them. The TBEs/aug‐cc‐pVTZ have been employed to benchmark a large number of (lower‐order) wave function methods such as CIS(D), ADC(2), CC2, STEOM‐CCSD, CCSD, CCSDR(3), CCSDT‐3, ADC(3), CC3, NEVPT2, and so on (including spin‐scaled variants). In order to gather the huge amount of data produced during the QUEST project, we have created a website (https://lcpq.github.io/QUESTDB_website) where one can easily test and compare the accuracy of a given method with respect to various variables such as the molecule size or its family, the nature of the excited states, the type of basis set, and so on. We hope that the present review will provide a useful summary of our effort so far and foster new developments around excited‐state methods.
This article is categorized under:
Electronic Structure Theory > Ab Initio Electronic Structure Methods
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