Cohesive properties of alkali halides

We calculate cohesive properties of LiF, NaF, KF, LiCl, NaCl, and KCl with ab initio quantum chemical methods. The coupled-cluster approach is used to correct the Hartree-Fock crystal results for correlations and to systematically improve cohesive energies, lattice constants, and bulk moduli. After inclusion of correlations, we recover 95--98% of the total cohesive energies. The lattice constants deviate from experiment by at most 1.1%, bulk moduli by at most 8%. We also find good agreement for spectroscopic properties of the corresponding diatomic molecules.