Benchmarks of electronically excited states: basis set effects on CASPT2 results

Vertical excitation energies and one-electron properties are computed for the valence excited states of 28 medium-sized organic benchmark molecules using multistate multiconfigurational second-order perturbation theory (MS-CASPT2) and the augmented correlation-consistent aug-cc-pVTZ basis set. They are compared with previously reported MS-CASPT2 results obtained with the smaller TZVP basis. The basis set extension from TZVP to aug-cc-pVTZ causes rather minor and systematic shifts in the vertical excitation energies that are normally slightly reduced (on average by 0.11 eV for the singlets and by 0.09 eV for the triplets), whereas the changes in the calculated oscillator strengths and dipole moments are somewhat more pronounced on a relative scale. These basis set effects at the MS-CASPT2 level are qualitatively and quantitatively similar to those found at the coupled cluster level for the same set of benchmark molecules. The previously proposed theoretical best estimates (TBE-1) for the vertical excitation energies for 104 singlet and 63 triplet excited states of the benchmark molecules are upgraded by replacing TZVP with aug-cc-pVTZ data that yields a new reference set (TBE-2). Statistical evaluations of the performance of density functional theory (DFT) and semiempirical methods lead to the same ranking and very similar quantitative results for TBE-1 and TBE-2, with slightly better performance measures with respect to TBE-2. DFT/MRCI is most accurate among the investigated DFT-based approaches, while the OMx methods with orthogonalization corrections perform best at the semiempirical level.