Performance of a one-parameter correlation factor for transcorrelation: Study on a series of second row atomic and molecular systems

Journal article, 2022

In this work, we investigate the performance of a recently proposed transcorrelated (TC) approach based on a single-parameter correlation factor [E. Giner, J. Chem. Phys. 154, 084119 (2021)] for systems involving more than two electrons. The benefit of such an approach relies on its simplicity as efficient numerical-analytical schemes can be set up to compute the two-and three-body integrals occurring in the effective TC Hamiltonian. To obtain accurate ground state energies within a given basis set, the present TC scheme is coupled to the recently proposed TC-full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo method [Cohen et al., J. Chem. Phys. 151, 061101 (2019)]. We report ground state total energies on the Li-Ne series, together with their first cations, computed with increasingly large basis sets and compare to more elaborate correlation factors involving electron-electron-nucleus coordinates. Numerical results on the Li-Ne ionization potentials show that the use of the single-parameter correlation factor brings on average only a slightly lower accuracy (1.2 mH) in a triple-zeta quality basis set with respect to a more sophisticated correlation factor. However, already using a quadruple-zeta quality basis set yields results within chemical accuracy to complete basis set limit results when using this novel single-parameter correlation factor. Calculations on the H2O, CH2, and FH molecules show that a similar precision can be obtained within a triple-zeta quality basis set for the atomization energies of molecular systems.