Importance profiles. Visualization of atomic basis set requirements

Abstract

Recent developments in fully numerical methods promise interesting opportunities for new, compact atomic orbital (AO) basis sets that maximize the overlap to fully numerical reference wave functions, following the pioneering work of Richardson and coworkers from the early 1960s. Motivated by this technique, we suggest a way to visualize the importance of AO basis functions employing fully numerical wave functions computed at the complete basis set (CBS) limit: the importance of a normalized AO basis function $|\alpha\rangle$ centered on some nucleus can be visualized by projecting $|\alpha\rangle$ on the set of numerically represented occupied orbitals $|\psi_{i}\rangle$ as $I_{0}(\alpha)=\sum_{i}\langle\alpha|\psi_{i}\rangle\langle\psi_{i}|\alpha\rangle$. Choosing $\alpha$ to be a continuous parameter describing the orbital basis, such as the exponent of a Gaussian-type orbital (GTO) or Slater-type orbital (STO) basis function, one is then able to visualize the importance of various functions. The proposed visualization $I_{0}(\alpha)$ has the important property $0\leq I_{0}(\alpha)\leq1$ which allows unambiguous interpretation. We also propose a straightforward generalization of the importance profile for polyatomic appliations $I(\alpha)$, in which the importance of a test function $|\alpha\rangle$ is measured as the increase in projection from the atomic minimal basis. We exemplify the methods with importance profiles computed for atoms from the first three rows, and for a set of chemically diverse diatomic molecules. We find that the importance profile offers a way to visualize the atomic basis set requirements for a given system in an a priori manner, provided that a fully numerical reference wave function is available.