Ab‐Initio MRD‐CI calculations for breaking a chemical bond in a molecule in a crystal or other solid environment I. H3C‐NO2 decomposition in nitromethane

Recently we derived, implemented, tested, and used successfully a new computational strategy for ab-initioMRD-CI (multireference double excitation - configuration interaction) calculations for molecular decompositions of large molecules and intermolecular reactions of large systems. We carry out the ab-initioSCF for the entire system, then transform the canonical delocalized molecular orbitals to localized orbitals and include explicitly in the MRD-CI only the localized occupied and virtual orbitals in the region of interest, folding the remainder of the occupied localized orbitals into an “effective” CI Hamiltonian. The advantage is that the transformations from integrals over atomic orbitals to integrals over molecular orbitals (the computer time-, computer core-, and external storage- consuming part of the CI calculations) only have to be carried out for the localized orbitals included explicitly in the MRD-CI calculations. The challenge arose to extend our MRD-CI technique based on localized/local orbitals and “effective” CI Hamiltonian to the breaking of a chemical bond in a molecule in a crystal (or other solid environment). This past year we have derived, implemented, and used successfully a procedure for doing this. Our technique involves solving a quantum chemical ab-initioSCF explicitly for a system of a reference molecule surrounded by a number of other molecules in the multipole environment of yet more further out surrounding molecules. The resulting canonical molecular orbitals are then localized and the localized occupied and virtual orbitals in the region of interest are included explicitly in the MRD-CI with the remainder of the occupied localized orbitals being folded into an “effective” CI Hamiltonian. The MRD-CI calculations are then carried out for breaking a bond in the reference molecule. This method is completely general. The space treated explicitly quantum chemically and the surrounding space can have defects, deformations, dislocations, impurities, dopants, edges, and surfaces, boundaries, etc. We have applied this procedure successfully to the H3C—NO2 bond dissociation of nitromethane with extensive testing of the number of molecules that have to be included explicitly in the SCF and how many further out molecules have to be represented by multipoles. To check the goodness of the model cluster approximation for crystalline nitromethane, we carried out ab-initio crystal orbital (XTLORB) calculations using our POLY-CRYST program. The difference in the XTLORB total energies between the 4 nitromethane molecules/unit cell and the 3 nitromethane molecules/unit cell (Table VIII), ER = E4 – E3 = −48.0609079 a.u., corresponds very closely to the reduced energy per nitromethane molecule, ER = (−;48.0605)9 a.u., calculated from explicit SCF calculations on the model nitromethane cluster in the multipole field of farther out nitromethane molecules for the model cluster. Thus, the multipole approximation for describing the effect of further out molecules on the SCF cluster energies is quite good.