Local-MP2 electron correlation method for nonconducting crystals

Rigorous methods for the post-HF (HF-Hartree-Fock) determination of correlation corrections for crystalline solids are currently being developed following different strategies. The CRYSTAL program developed in Torino and Daresbury provides accurate HF solutions for periodic systems in a basis set of Gaussian type functions; for insulators, the occupied HF manifold can be represented as an antisymmetrized product of well localized Wannier functions. This makes possible the extension to nonconducting crystals of local correlation linear scaling On techniques as successfully and efficiently implemented in Stuttgart's MOLPRO program. These methods exploit the fact that dynamic electron correlation effects between remote parts of a molecule (manifesting as dispersive interactions in intermolecular perturbation theory) decay as an inverse sixth power of the distance R between these fragments, that is, much more quickly than the Coulomb interactions that are treated already at the HF level. Translational symmetry then permits the crystalline problem to be reduced to one concerning a cluster around the reference zero cell. A periodic local correlation program (CRYSCOR) has been prepared along these lines, limited for the moment to the solution of second-order Moller-Plesset equations. Exploitation of point group symmetry is shown to be more important and useful than in the molecular case. The computational strategy adopted and preliminary results concerning five semiconductors with tetrahedral structure (C, Si, SiC, BN, and BeS) are presented and discussed.