The origin of deficiency of the supermolecule second-order Moller-Plesset approach for evaluating interaction energies.

Calculations for the complex of thymine and adenine are used to show that the supermolecule second-order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) approach for evaluating interaction energies fails in certain cases because of the behavior of one of its components: the uncoupled Hartree-Fock dispersion energy. A simple approach for correcting the MP2 supermolecule interaction energies is proposed. It focuses on correcting a relatively small difference between the MP2 and coupled cluster interaction energies, which is a very appealing feature of the new approach considering a benchmark role played by coupled cluster results.

Ab initio calculations of dispersion coefficients for nucleic acid base pairs.

The results of ab initio calculations of two- and three-body dispersion coefficients for the four most important nucleic acid bases are reported. The isotropic as well as anisotropic coefficients were found by using the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approach and the aug-cc-pVDZ basis set. Single and double excitation coupled-cluster theory with noniterative treatment of triple excitations [CCSD(T)] was used to find the values of static polarizabilities which were subsequently used to estimate the values of the CCSD(T) dispersion coefficients.

An analysis of the electrostatic interaction between nucleic acid bases.

Results from several commonly used approximate methods of evaluating electrostatic interactions have been compared to the rigorous, nonexpanded electrostatic energies at both uncorrelated and correlated levels of theory. We examined a number of energy profiles for both hydrogen bonded and stacked configurations of the nucleic acid base pairs. We found that the penetration effects play an extremely important role and the expanded electrostatic energies are significantly underestimated with respect to the ab initio values.

Critical examination of the supermolecule density functional theory calculations of intermolecular interactions.

The results of calculations employing twelve different combinations of exchange and correlation functionals are compared with results of ab initio calculations for two different configurations of the water dimer and three different configurations of the thymine-adenine complex. None of the density functional theory (DFT) treatments could properly reproduce the results of coupled-cluster calculations for all configurations examined. The DFT approaches perform well when the interaction energy is dominated by the electrostatic component and the dispersion energy is less important.

New approximations for calculating dispersion coefficients.

Improved approaches for finding approximate values of dispersion coefficients are proposed. They are based on scaling the values of time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) dispersion coefficients by factors that use the ratio of the estimated true value and the TDHF value of static dipole polarizabilities. It is shown that for a set of 14 atoms and molecules the average absolute-value deviation of the estimated two-body isotropic dispersion coefficients with respect to the dipole oscillator strength distribution results is smaller than 1.