Appraisal of molecular tailoring approach for large clusters

High level ab initio investigations on molecular clusters are generally restricted to those of small size essentially due to the nonlinear scaling of corresponding computational cost. Molecular tailoring approach (MTA) is a fragmentation-based method, which offers an economical and efficient route for studying larger clusters. However, due to its approximate nature, the MTA-energies carry some errors vis-a-vis their full calculation counterparts. These errors in the MTA-energies are reduced by grafting the correction at a lower basis set (e. g., 6-31+G(d)) onto a higher basis set (e. g., aug-cc-pvdz or aug-cc-pvtz) calculation at MP2 level of theory. Further, better estimates of energies are obtained by making use of many-body interaction analysis. For this purpose, R-goodness (Rg) parameters for the three-and four-body interactions in a fragmentation scheme are proposed. The procedure employing grafting and many-body analysis has been tested out on molecular clusters of water, benzene, acetylene and carbon dioxide. It is found that for the fragmentation scheme having higher three- and four-body Rg-values, the errors in MTA-grafted energies are reduced typically to similar to 0.2 mH at MP2 level calculation. Coupled with the advantage in terms of computational resources and CPU time, the present method opens a possibility of accurate treatment of large molecular clusters. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4793706]