IMPROVED ABINITIO EFFECTIVE CORE POTENTIALS FOR MOLECULAR CALCULATIONS

We have investigated the sources of error in bond lengths and dissociation energies computed from ab initio effective potentials derived from Phillips-Kleinman type pseudo-orbitals. We propose an alternate pseudo-orbital, effective potential treatment with the primary objective of agreement with all-electron molecular calculations. This new treatment forces the pseudo-orbitals to match precisely the Hartree-Fock orbitals in the valence region and thereby eliminates the major cause of error in the earlier calculations. Effective core potentials derived from these revised pseudo-orbitals were used to compute potential energy curves for the ground states of F2, Cl2, and LiCl and the results are compared with previous all-electron and effective potential calculations. Our effective potentials yield dissociation energies and bond lengths which are in excellent agreement with the all-electron values. Furthermore, in contrast to other procedures, our revised effective potentials result in an excellent description of the inner repulsive walls of the dissociation curves. © 1979 American Institute of Physics.