Combining coupled cluster and perturbation theory

Single reference coupled cluster (CC) singles and doubles theory is combined with low-order perturbation theory (PT) to treat ground state electron correlation. Two variants of the general scheme are discussed that differ in the type of amplitudes that are approximated perturbatively and which are treated to infinite order. The combined CC/PT methods to include ground state correlation are merged with equation-of-motion (EOM) and similarity transformed EOM methods to describe excitation spectra of the highly correlated s-tetrazine, MnO4- and Ni(CO)(4) systems. It is shown that the computationally efficient CC/PT schemes can reproduce full CCSD results even if perturbation theory by itself is a very poor approximation, as is the case for many transition metal compounds. In a second test CC/PT is applied to determine ground state equilibrium molecular structures and harmonic vibrational frequencies for a set of small molecules. Using either variant of CC/PT, full CCSD geometries are easily recovered, while vibrational frequencies can be more sensitive to details of the approximation. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-9606(99)30647-4].