Analytic gradients for compressed multistate pair-density functional theory
Jie J. Bao, Matthew R. Hermes, Thais R. Scott, Andrew M. Sand, Roland Lindh, Laura Gagliardi, Donald G. Truhlar
Abstract
Photochemical reactions often involve states that are closely coupled due to near degeneracies, for example by proximity to conical intersections. Therefore, a multistate method is used to accurately describe these states; for example, ordinary perturbation theory is replaced by quasidegenerate perturbation theory. Multiconfiguration pair-density functional theory (MC-PDFT) provides an efficient way to approximate the full dynamical correlation energy of strongly correlated systems, and we recently proposed compressed multistate pair-density functional theory (CMS-PDFT) to treat closely coupled states. In the present paper, we report the implementation of analytic gradients for CMS-PDFT in both OpenMolcas and PySCF, and we illustrate the use of these gradients by applying the method to the excited states of formaldehyde and phenol.