Concordant Mode Approach for Molecular Vibrations

The Concordant Mode Approach (CMA) is advanced as a novel hierarchy for increasing the system size and level of theory feasible for quantum chemical computations of harmonic vibrational frequencies. The key concept behind CMA is that transferrable, internal-coordinate normal modes computed at an appropriate lower level of theory (B) comprise a superb basis for converging to vibrational frequencies given by a higher level of theory (A). Accordingly, high-level harmonic frequencies can be evaluated via CMA from a collection of single-point energies that essentially scales linearly in the number of atoms, providing nearly order-of-magnitude CPU time speedups. The accuracy of CMA methods was established by comprehensive tests on over 120 molecules for target Level A = CCSD(T)/cc-pVTZ with auxiliary Level B choices of both CCSD(T)/cc-pVDZ and B3LYP/6-31G(2df,p). Remarkably, the frequency residuals given by the diagonal CMA-0A(nc) scheme exhibit mean absolute deviations (MADs) of only 0.2 cm^-1 and standard deviations less than 0.5 cm^-1; the corresponding zero-point vibrational energies (ZPVEs) have negligible errors in the vicinity of 0.3 cm^-1.