PNNL

Abstract

We establish a new estimate for the interaction energy between two benzene molecules in the parallel displaced (PD) conformation by systematically converging (i) the intra- and intermolecular geometry at the minimum geometry, (ii) the expansion of the orbital basis set and (iii) the level of electron correlation. The calculations were performed at the second order Møller - Plesset perturbation (MP2) and the Coupled Cluster including Singles, Doubles and a perturbative estimate of Triples replacements [CCSD(T)] levels of electronic structure theory. At both levels of theory, by including results corrected for Basis Set Superposition Error (BSSE), we have estimated the Complete Basis Set (CBS) limit by employing the family of Dunning’s correlation consistent polarized valence basis sets. The largest MP2 calculation was performed with the cc-pV6Z basis set (2,772 basis functions), whereas the largest CCSD(T) calculation with the cc-pV5Z basis set (1,752 basis functions). The cluster geometries were optimized with basis sets up to quadruple-? quality, observing that both its intra- and inter-molecular parts have practically converged with the triple-? quality sets. The use of converged geometries was found to play an important role for obtaining accurate estimates for the CBS limits. Our results demonstrate that the binding energies with the families of the plain (cc-pVnZ) and augmented (aug-cc-pVnZ) sets converge [to within