Localization of molecular orbitals: from fragments to molecule

Conspectus Localized molecular orbitals (LMO) not only serve as an important bridge between chemical intuition and molecular wave functions but also can be employed to reduce the computational cost of many-body methods for electron correlation and excitation. Therefore, how to localize the usually completely delocalized canonical molecular orbitals (CMO) into confined physical spaces has long been an important topic: It has a long history but still remains active to date. While the known LMOs can be classified into (exact) orthonormal and nonorthogonal, as well as (approximate) absolutely localized MOs, the ways for achieving these can be classified into two categories, a posteriori top-down and a priori bottom-up, depending on whether they invoke the global CMOs (or equivalently the molecular density matrix). While the top-down approaches have to face heavy tasks of minimizing or maximizing a given localization functional typically of many adjacent local extrema, the bottom-up ones have to invoke some tedious procedures for first generating a local basis composed of well-defined occupied and unoccupied subsets and then maintaining or resuming the locality when solving the Hartree-Fock/Kohn-Sham (HF/KS) optimization condition. It is shown here that the good of these kinds of approaches can be combined together to form a very efficient hybrid approach that can generate the desired LMOs for any kind of gapped molecules. Specifically, a top-down localization functional, applied to individual small subsystems only, is minimized to generate an orthonormal local basis composed of functions centered on the preset chemical fragments. The familiar notion for atomic cores, lone pairs, and chemical bonds emerges here automatically. Such a local basis is then employed in the global HF/KS calculation, after which a least action is taken toward the final orthonormal localized molecular orbitals (LMO), both occupied and virtual. This last step is very cheap, implying that, after the CMOs, the LMOs can be obtained essentially for free. Because molecular fragments are taken as the basic elements, the approach is in the spirit of "from fragments to molecule". Two representatives of highly conjugated molecules, that is, C12H2 and C60, are taken as showcases for demonstrating the success of the proposed approach. The use of the so-obtained LMOs will lead naturally to low-order scaling post-HF/KS methods for electron correlation or excitation. In addition, the underlying fragment picture allows for easy and pictorial interpretations of the correlation/excitation dynamics.