Approaching the complete basis set limit of CCSD(T) for large systems by the third-order incremental dual-basis set zero-buffer F12 method.

The third-order incremental dual-basis set zero-buffer approach was combined with CCSD(T)-F12x (x = a, b) theory to develop a new approach, i.e., the inc3-db-B0-CCSD(T)-F12 method, which can be applied as a black-box procedure to efficiently obtain the near complete basis set (CBS) limit of the CCSD(T) energies also for large systems. We tested this method for several cases of different chemical nature: four complexes taken from the standard benchmark sets S66 and X40, the energy difference between isomers of water hexamer and the rotation barrier of biphenyl. The results show that our method has an error relative to the best estimation of CBS energy of only 0.2 kcal/mol or less. By parallelization, our method can accomplish the CCSD(T)-F12 calculations of about 60 correlated electrons and 800 basis functions in only several days, which by standard implementation are impossible for ordinary hardware. We conclude that the inc3-db-B0-CCSD(T)-F12a/AVTZ method, which is of CCSD(T)/AV5Z quality, is close to the limit of accuracy that one can achieve for large systems currently.