Density fitting of intramonomer correlation effects in symmetry-adapted perturbation theory

Abstract

Symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) offers insight into the nature of intermolecular interactions. In addition, accurate energies can be obtained from the wave function-based variant of SAPT provided that intramonomer electron correlation effects are included. We apply density-fitting (DF) approximations to the intramonomer correlation corrections in SAPT. The introduction of this approximation leads to an improvement in the computational cost of SAPT by reducing the scaling of certain SAPT terms, reducing the amount of disk I/O, and avoiding the explicit computation of certain types of MO integrals. We have implemented all the intramonomer correlation corrections to SAPT through second-order under the DF approximation. Additionally, leading third-order terms are also implemented. The accuracy of this truncation of SAPT is tested against the S22 test set of Hobza and co-workers [Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 8, 1985 (2006)]. When the intramonomer corrections to dispersion are included in SAPT, a mean absolute deviation of 0.3–0.4 kcal mol−1 is observed for the S22 test set when using an aug-cc-pVDZ basis. The computations on the adenine-thymine complexes in the S22 test set with an aug-cc-pVDZ basis represent the largest SAPT computations to date that include this degree of intramonomer correlation. Computations of this size can now be performed routinely with our newly developed DF-SAPT program.