First application of the transcorrelated method to noncovalent interactions: The A24 dataset

Abstract

We present the first application of transcorrelated (TC) coupled-cluster (CC) theory to noncovalent interactions within the xTC approximation. The method is assessed for the A24 dataset of hydrogen-bonded, mixed and pure dispersion bound dimers. The xTC interaction energies are computed at the CCSD, DCSD, and CCSD(T) levels in aug-cc-pVDZ (AVDZ), aug-cc-pVTZ (AVTZ) basis sets, and are compared with both canonical and explicitly correlated F12 methods. Because non-covalent interaction energies rely on delicate error cancellation between dimers and monomers, we optimize the TC Jastrow factor for each dimer, and reuse the same parameters for the corresponding monomer calculations. This shared-parameter strategy reduces stochastic optimization noise which would otherwise dominate the interaction energies. The results show that the xTC-CCSD(T)/AVTZ method performs extremely well for the hydrogen-bonded systems, with a mean-absolute error of only 0.007 kcal/mol in the interaction energies, with respect to the benchmark values generated with CCSD(T)/CBS + $Δ$CCSDT(Q) + core corrections. For pure dispersion bound systems the errors are slightly larger (0.055 kcal/mol), leading to an overall MAE of 0.030 kcal/mol for the entire dataset. Adding a $Δ$MP2 correction to the xTC-CCSD(T)/AVDZ brings these results close to AVTZ quality and provides a practical route toward larger noncovalent systems. A decomposition of the xTC interaction energy into a mean-field and correlation contribution shows that part of the correlation contribution is systematically shifted by the TC method to the mean-field contribution. This physically appealing feature indicates that the TC method has great potential for the quantitative description of noncovalent interactions, and opens a new route for high-accuracy quantum chemistry to be applied to systems of biological and soft-matter interest.