Frontiers in electronic structure theory

Current and emerging research areas in electronic structure theory promise to greatly extend the scope and quality of quantum chemical computations. Two particularly challenging problems are the accurate description of electronic near-degeneracies (as occur in bond-breaking reactions, first-row transition elements, etc.) and the description of long-range dispersion interactions in density functional theory. Additionally, even with the emergence of reduced-scaling electronic structure methods and basis set extrapolation techniques, quantum chemical computations remain very time-consuming for large molecules or large basis sets. A variety of techniques, including density fitting and explicit correlation methods, are making rapid progress toward solving these challenges.