Dispersion correction derived from first principles for density functional theory and Hartree-Fock theory.

The modeling of dispersion interactions in density functional theory (DFT) is commonly performed using an energy correction that involves empirically fitted parameters for all atom pairs of the system investigated. In this study, the first-principles-derived dispersion energy from the effective fragment potential (EFP) method is implemented for the density functional theory (DFT-D(EFP)) and Hartree-Fock (HF-D(EFP)) energies. Overall, DFT-D(EFP) performs similarly to the semiempirical DFT-D corrections for the test cases investigated in this work. HF-D(EFP) tends to underestimate binding energies and overestimate intermolecular equilibrium distances, relative to coupled cluster theory, most likely due to incomplete accounting for electron correlation. Overall, this first-principles dispersion correction yields results that are in good agreement with coupled-cluster calculations at a low computational cost.