A summary of the technical advances that are incorporated in the fourth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program is provided, covering approximately the last seven years. These include developments in density functional theory methods and algorithms, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) property evaluation, coupled cluster and perturbation theories, methods for electronically excited and openshell species, tools for treating extended environments, algorithms for walking on potential surfaces, analysis tools, energy and electron transfer modelling, parallel computing capabilities, and graphical user interfaces. In addition, a selection of example case studies that illustrate these capabilities is given. These include extensive benchmarks of the comparative accuracy of modern density functionals for bonded and non-bonded interactions, tests of attenuated second order Møller-Plesset (MP2) methods for intermolecular interactions, a variety of parallel performance benchmarks, and tests of the accuracy of implicit solvation models. Some specific chemical examples include calculations on the strongly correlated Cr 2 dimer, exploring zeolitecatalysed ethane dehydrogenation, energy decomposition analysis of a charged ter-molecular complex arising from glycerol photoionisation, and natural transition orbitals for a Frenkel exciton state in a nine-unit model of a self-assembling nanotube.Keywords quantum chemistry, software, electronic structure theory, density functional theory, electron correlation, computational modelling, Q-Chem Disciplines Chemistry CommentsThis article is from Molecular Physics: An International Journal at the Interface Between Chemistry and Physics 113 (2015): 184, doi:10.1080/00268976.2014. RightsWorks produced by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are not copyrighted within the U.S. The content of this document is not copyrighted. Authors 185A summary of the technical advances that are incorporated in the fourth major release of the Q-CHEM quantum chemistry program is provided, covering approximately the last seven years. These include developments in density functional theory methods and algorithms, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) property evaluation, coupled cluster and perturbation theories, methods for electronically excited and open-shell species, tools for treating extended environments, algorithms for walking on potential surfaces, analysis tools, energy and electron transfer modelling, parallel computing capabilities, and graphical user interfaces. In addition, a selection of example case studies that illustrate these capabilities is given. These include extensive benchmarks of the comparative accuracy of modern density functionals for bonded and non-bonded interactions, tests of attenuated second order Møller-Plesset (MP2) methods for intermolecular interactions, a variety of parallel performance benchmarks, and tests of the accuracy of implicit solvation models. Some specific chemical examples include calculations on the strongly corre...

Advances in theory and algorithms for electronic structure calculations must be incorporated into program packages to enable them to become routinely used by the broader chemical community. This work reviews advances made over the past five years or so that constitute the major improvements contained in a new release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry package, together with illustrative timings and applications. Specific developments discussed include fast methods for density functional theory calculations, linear scaling evaluation of energies, NMR chemical shifts and electric properties, fast auxiliary basis function methods for correlated energies and gradients, equation-of-motion coupled cluster methods for ground and excited states, geminal wavefunctions, embedding methods and techniques for exploring potential energy surfaces.

Abstract.A simplified approach to treating the electron correlation energy is suggested in which only the alpha-beta component of the second order Møller-Plesset energy is evaluated, and then scaled by an empirical factor which is suggested to be 1.3. This scaled opposite spin second order energy (SOS-MP2) yields results for relative energies and derivative properties that are statistically improved over the conventional MP2 method. Furthermore, the SOS-MP2 energy can be evaluated without the 5th order computational steps associated with MP2 theory, even without exploiting any spatial locality. A 4th order algorithm is given for evaluating the opposite spin MP2 energy using auxiliary basis expansions, and a Laplace approach, and timing comparisons are given. * These authors contributed equally to this work. † To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mhg@cchem.berkeley.edu 2 1.Introduction.The most popular electronic structure method for application to systems with large numbers of electrons is density functional theory (DFT) [1,2]. However DFT methods at present completely neglect the dispersion interactions [3] that give rise to base pair stacking and other long-range correlation effects (for example the TCNE dimer dianion [4]). Novel workarounds are being explored for dispersion interactions of monomers [5][6] or ordered layers and surfaces [7,8], but do not presently apply to molecular systems. More empirical modifications of standard functionals have also been developed to improve non-bonded interactions [9,10]. Also we note that present-day DFT methods are somewhat suspect for reaction barriers. Standard functionals tend to underestimate activation energies [11], largely as a consequence of the self-interaction issue [12].The simplest electronic structure alternative to DFT that can correctly treat dispersion and hydrogen-bonding interactions is second order Møller-Plesset theory (MP2) [13]. MP2 theory is capable of quite accurately treating long-range dispersion interactions [14], as well as the dispersion, polarization and covalency effects associated with hydrogen bonding (for instance in water clusters [15]). However, MP2 has several significant drawbacks: First is relatively high computational cost, even with the best standard algorithms. Second is the need for quite large atomic orbital basis sets in order to obtain good results [16], which can further reduce the upper limit on system size. Third is the fact that poor results can be obtained for open shell systems [17], in contrast to the good behavior for closed shell molecules [18].There has been significant progress in addressing the steep cost increase of MP2calculations with molecular size in recent years. Three main types of developments can be 3 identified. First are methods that reduce the prefactor without changing the underlying scaling, such as "resolution of the identity" methods [19,20] or the pseudo-spectral approach [21], and others [22]. Second are methods that attempt to exploit "underlying locality" in the MP2problem, w...

A molecular origin of the striking rate increase observed in a reaction on water is studied theoretically. A key aspect of the on-water rate phenomenon is the chemistry between water and reactants that occurs at an oil−water phase boundary. In particular, the structure of water at the oil−water interface of an oil emulsion, in which approximately one in every four interfacial water molecules has a free (“dangling”) OH group that protrudes into the organic phase, plays a key role in catalyzing reactions via the formation of hydrogen bonds. Catalysis is expected when these OH's form stronger hydrogen bonds with the transition state than with the reactants. In experiments more than a 5 orders of magnitude enhancement in rate constant was found in a chosen reaction. The structural arrangement at the “oil−water” interface is in contrast to the structure of water molecules around a small hydrophobic solute in homogeneous solution, where the water molecules are tangentially oriented. The latter implies that a breaking of an existing hydrogen-bond network in homogeneous solution is needed in order to permit a catalytic effect of hydrogen bonds, but not for the on-water reaction. Thereby, the reaction in homogeneous aqueous solution is intrinsically slower than the surface reaction, as observed experimentally. The proposed mechanism of rate acceleration is discussed in light of other on-water reactions that showed smaller accelerations in rates. To interpret the results in different media, a method is given for comparing the rate constants of different rate processes, homogeneous, neat and on-water, all of which have different units, by introducing models that reduce them to the same units. The observed deuterium kinetic isotope effect is discussed briefly, and some experiments are suggested that can test the present interpretation and increase our understanding of the on-water catalysis.

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design.