Efficient implementation of one- and two-component analytical energy gradients in exact two-component theory

We present an efficient algorithm for one- and two-component analytical energy gradients with respect to nuclear displacements in the exact two-component decoupling approach to the one-electron Dirac equation (X2C). Our approach is a generalization of the spin-free ansatz by Cheng and Gauss [J. Chem. Phys. 135, 084114 (2011)], where the perturbed one-electron Hamiltonian is calculated by solving a first-order response equation. Computational costs are drastically reduced by applying the diagonal local approximation to the unitary decoupling transformation (DLU) [D. Peng and M. Reiher, J. Chem. Phys. 136, 244108 (2012)] to the X2C Hamiltonian. The introduced error is found to be almost negligible as the mean absolute error of the optimized structures amounts to only 0.01 pm. Our implementation in TURBOMOLE is also available within the finite nucleus model based on a Gaussian charge distribution. For a X2C/DLU gradient calculation, computational effort scales cubically with the molecular size, while storage increases quadratically. The efficiency is demonstrated in calculations of large silver clusters and organometallic iridium complexes. Published by AIP Publishing.