Quasi-variational coupled-cluster theory: Performance of perturbative treatments of connected triple excitations

Quasi-variational coupled-cluster methods are applied to a selection of diatomic molecules. The potential energy curves, spectroscopic constants, and size consistency errors are calculated and compared to those obtained from both single-and multi-reference methods. The effects of connected triple excitations are introduced with either the standard perturbative (T) formulation, or in the renormalised form, and its symmetrised approximation. It is found that the renormalised ansatz is significantly superior to the standard formulation when describing bond breaking and that in most circumstances, the computationally simpler symmetrisation gives nearly identical results. Published by AIP Publishing.