Dynamic polarizabilities and excitation energies are obtained from multireference configuration interaction wave functions. The multiconfigurational reference function is designed to represent the ground state as well as the perturbed states and the first excited state on equal footing; i.e., orbital optimization is performed in a perturbed multiconfigurational self-consistent field procedure. Furthermore, perturbed and excited multireference configuration interaction wave functions are obtained simultaneously for several frequencies of the perturbing field. Reduced three-term spectra are derived which reproduce exactly the calculated polarizabilities at the selected frequencies and very well interpolate the dynamic polarizabilities up to the first pole. These reduced spectra also serve to calculate long-range interaction coefficients. The results for both the dynamic polarizabilities and the interaction coefficients are found to be in excellent agreement with experimental values where such data exists and also with most accurate theoretical results.
I. IntroductionIn this work we continue to investigate the ability of direct multireference configuration interaction (MR-CI) methods to compute reliable dynamic polarizabilities. While the calculation of static polarizabilities is rather straightforward for all quantum chemical methods by using finite fields, such an approach is not possible for dynamic polarizabilities which therefore pose a much more challenging problem. So far the influence of electron correlation on the calculation of dynamic polarizabilities has mainly been studied in the multiconfiguration self-consistent field (MC-SCF) approximation or in the context of many-body perturbation theory (MBPT), whereas CI methods have only occasionally been used. The MC-SCF applications are usually based on the multiconfigurational linear-response approach derived by Dalgaard 1 and Olsen and Jørgensen. 2 It is an direct extension of the simple and rather successful coupled HartreeFock formalism 3,4 in that the perturbed wave function is obtained as the first derivative with respect to the (time-dependent) field strength from a wave function ansatz with predefined configurational structure but field-dependent configuration and orbital expansion coefficients. This "derivative approach" has as well be applied to second-order Møller-Plesset (MP2) wave functions by Rice and Handy 5 and Hättig and He . 6 Perturbation expansions have also been used in a nonderivative "perturbational" approach, that is, by double perturbation theory up to second order in both electron correlation and external perturbation, based on a single field-independent orbital set. 7-10 While this latter method as well as the derivative MP2 method are restricted to ground states which are well approximated by a single closed-shell determinant, the MC-SCF linear response method is rather limited in the amount of dynamic correlation that can be accounted for. We believe that the highly flexible MR-CI method should be a viable tool for treating dynami...