Thermochemical kinetics for multireference systems: addition reactions of ozone

The 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions of ozone to ethyne and ethene provide extreme examples of multireference singlet-state chemistry, and they are examined here to test the applicability of several approaches to thermochemical kinetics of systems with large static correlation. Four different multireference diagnostics are applied to measure the multireference characters of the reactants, products, and transition states; all diagnostics indicate significant multireference character in the reactant portion of the potential energy surfaces. We make a more complete estimation of the effect of quadruple excitations than was previously available, and we use this with CCSDT/CBS estimation of Wheeler et al. (Wheeler, S. E.; Ess, D. H.; Houk, K. N. J. Phys. Chem. A 2008, 112, 1798.) to make new best estimates of the van der Waals association energy, the barrier height, and the reaction energy to form the cycloadduct for both reactions. Comparing with these best estimates, we present comprehensive mean unsigned errors for a variety of coupled cluster, multilevel, and density functional methods. Several computational aspects of multireference reactions are considered: (i) the applicability of multilevel theory, (ii) the convergence of coupled cluster theory for reaction barrier heights, (iii) the applicability of completely renormalized coupled cluster methods to multireference systems, (iv) the treatment by density functional theory, (v) the multireference perturbation theory for multireference reactions, and (vi) the relative accuracy of scaling-type multilevel methods as compared with additive ones. It is found that scaling-type multilevel methods do not perform better than the additive-type multilevel methods. Among the 48 tested density functionals, only M05 reproduces the best estimates within their uncertainty. Multireference perturbation theory based on the complete-active-space reference wave functions constructed using a small number of reaction-specific active orbitals gives accurate forward barrier heights; however, it significantly underestimates reaction energies.