Near-Exact Nuclear Gradients of Complete Active Space Self-Consistent Field Wave Functions

Abstract

In this paper, we study the nuclear gradients of heat bath configuration interaction self-consistent field (HCISCF) wave functions and use them to optimize molecular geometries for various molecules. We show that the HCISCF nuclear gradients are fairly insensitive to the size of the "selected" variational space, which allows us to reduce the computational cost without introducing significant error. The ability of HCISCF to treat larger active spaces combined with the flexibility for users to control the computational cost makes the method very attractive for studying strongly correlated systems which require a larger active space than possible with complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF). Finally, we study the realistic catalyst, Fe(PDI), and highlight some of the challenges this system poses for density functional theory (DFT). We demonstrate how HCISCF can clarify the energetic stability of geometries obtained from DFT when the results are strongly dependent on the functional. We also use the HCISCF gradients to optimize geometries for this species and show that the triplet potential energy surface is much more sensitive to the nuclear coordinates than the singlet surface.