Computer-predicted ionization energy of carbon within 1 cm$^{-1}$ of the best experiment

Abstract

We show that we can predict the first ionization energy of the carbon atom to within 0.872 cm$^{-1}$ of the experimental value. This is an improvement of more than a factor of 6.5 over the preceding best prediction in [Phys. Rev. A 81, 022503], and opens the door to achieving sub-cm$^{-1}$ accuracy for ab-initio predictions in larger elements of the periodic table.