VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCIES OF OZONE - A MULTICONFIGURATIONAL APPROACH

The electronic ground state of ozone and, in particular, its equilibrium geometry and harmonic vibration frequencies was studied by a variety of multiconfiguration and single-configuration methods. It is well known that the antisymmetric stretch frequency cannot be correctly obtained by single-reference methods unless at least triple excitations are included. Extensive comparison with other work in the literature shows that basis-set effects must be taken into account since the omega3 frequency is very sensitive to computational details. The multiconfiguration methods are shown to give good results provided that an adequate configuration space is used. In particular, the second-order complete active space perturbation method performs very satisfactorily. Traditional multireference configuration interaction (MRCI) methods, using a few reference functions, do not perform so well. A two-reference CI is able to give reasonable results, but only when the orbitals have been prepared by some properly correlated method. Adding several reference functions gives small improvements, and the result is capriciously dependent on the type of reference functions included. The success of the perturbation method, as well as an extreme type of MRCI, indicates that it is far more important to include a large number of diverse configurations in the reference than to treat the remaining dynamical correlation accurately.