A modified CAS-CI approach for an efficient calculation of magnetic exchange coupling constants

A modification of the conventional wavefunction-based CAS-CI method for the calculation of magnetic exchange coupling constants J in small molecules and transition metal complexes is presented. In general, CAS-CI approaches yield much too small values for J since the energies of the important charge transfer configurations are calculated with the ground state orbitals and are therefore much too high. In the present approach we improve these energies by accounting for the relaxation of the orbitals in the charge transfer configurations. The necessary relaxation energies R can be obtained in separate calculations using mononuclear or binuclear model systems. The method is applied to a few examples, small molecules, binuclear transition metal complexes, and bulk NiO. It allows to obtaining fairly reliable estimates for J at costs that are not higher than those of conventional CAS-CI calculations. Therefore, extended and very time-consuming perturbation theory (PT2), configuration interaction (CI), or coupled cluster (CC) schemes on top of the CAS-CI calculation can be avoided and the modified CAS-CI (MCAS-CI) approach can be applied to rather large systems.