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Updated: May 20, 2026

Computation of Atmospheric Concentrations of Molecular Clusters from ab initio Thermochemistry
Published on: April 8, 2020
On the accuracy of frozen density embedding calculations with hybrid and orbital-dependent functionals for non-bonded
S Laricchia1, E Fabiano, F Della Sala
1Center for Biomolecular Nanotechnologies @UNILE, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Via Barsanti, 73010 Arnesano (LE), Italy.
Abstract:
We analyze the accuracy of the frozen density embedding (FDE) method, with hybrid and orbital-dependent exchange-correlation functionals, for the calculation of the total interaction energies of weakly interacting systems. Our investigation is motivated by the fact that these approaches require, in addition to the non-additive kinetic energy approximation, also approximate non-additive exact-exchange energies. Despite this further approximation, we find that the hybrid/orbital-dependent FDE approaches can reproduce the total energies with the same accuracy (about 1 mHa) as the one of conventional semi-local functionals. In many cases, thanks to error cancellation effects, hybrid/orbital-dependent approaches yield even the smallest error. A detailed energy-decomposition investigation is presented. Finally, the Becke-exchange functional is found to reproduce accurately the non-additive exact-exchange energies also for non-equilibrium geometries. These performances are rationalized in terms of a reduced-gradient decomposition of the non-additive exchange energy.
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