Multicomponent Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles Theory within the Nuclear-Electronic Orbital Framework

The nuclear-electronic orbital (NEO) method treats all electrons and specified nuclei, typically protons, quantum mechanically on the same level with molecular orbital techniques. This approach directly includes nuclear delocalization, anharmonicity, and zero point energy contributions of the quantum nuclei in the self-consistent-field procedure for solving the time-independent Schrödinger equation. Herein the multicomponent wave function based methods configuration interaction singles and doubles (CISD) and coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) are implemented within the NEO framework and are applied to molecular systems. In contrast to the NEO-HF (Hartree-Fock) and NEO-CISD methods, which produce proton densities that are much too localized, the NEO-CCSD method produces accurate proton densities in reasonable agreement with a grid-based reference. Moreover, the NEO-CCSD method also predicts accurate proton affinities in agreement with experimental measurements for a set of 12 molecules. An advantage of the NEO-CCSD method is its ability to include nuclear quantum effects, such as proton delocalization and zero point energy, during geometry optimizations and nuclear dynamics simulations. The NEO-CCSD method is a promising, parameter free approach for including nuclear quantum effects in high-level electronic structure calculations of molecular systems.