Electronic energy is retrieved by iFCI using an -body expansion of the form
(6.67) |
where each term denotes an increment of correlation energy and refer to bodies of the expansion. Incremental correlation energies are defined as
(6.68) | |||||
(6.69) | |||||
(6.70) | |||||
where terms subtract lower-order increments to avoid double counting. Terms represent -body additions to the correlation energy from electrons in the mean field of the remaining electrons, where each value is computed by solving CAS-CI for electrons in orbitals. For example, performs CAS()-CI to give the value of . Proceeding likewise for higher , CAS()-CI produces each .
Heat-bath CI (HBCI) is utilized to solve each CAS-CI Hamiltonian, performing selected CI computations according to determinants, , coupled to the CI wave function in the form , where is the energy cutoff and are determinants in the HBCI subspace.
Truncation of incremental terms is performed by considering natural orbital (NO) occupancy cutoffs, , where
(6.71) | |||||
(6.72) | |||||
Doing so reduces the size of the virtual space by only including virtual orbitals with sufficiently large NO eigenvalues. Convergence for each iFCI increment is reached when
(6.73) |
with units of E. Further truncation in can be performed by utilizing the parameter and a screening cutoff, , in the form
(6.74) |
where is in E and is a scalar. This screening is performed by selecting body correlation energy contributions that are above . See Ref. 947 for more details. is a parameter in the input.
iFCI requires a high-spin perfect pairing (PP) reference, where NOs are localized as local bonding-antibonding pairs, or geminals.