We describe how to create ab initio effective Hamiltonians that qualitatively describe correct chemistry even when used with a minimal basis. The Hamiltonians are obtained by folding correlation down from a large parent basis into a small, or minimal, target basis, using the machinery of canonical transformations. We demonstrate the quality of these effective Hamiltonians to correctly capture a wide range of excited states in water, nitrogen, and ethylene and to describe ground and excited state bond breaking in nitrogen and the chromium dimer, all in small or minimal basis sets.

The strongly contracted variant of second-order N-electron valence state perturbation theory (NEVPT2) is an efficient perturbative method to treat dynamic correlation without the problems of intruder states or level shifts, while the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) provides the capability to address static correlation in large active spaces. We present a combination of the DMRG and strongly contracted NEVPT2 (DMRG-SC-NEVPT2) that uses an efficient algorithm to compute high-order reduced-density matrices from DMRG wave functions. The capabilities of DMRG-SC-NEVPT2 are demonstrated on calculations of the chromium dimer potential energy curve at the basis set limit, and the excitation energies of a trimer model of poly(p-phenylenevinylene) (PPV(n = 3)).

We describe and extend the formalism of state-specific analytic density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) energy gradients, first used by Liu et al. [J. Chem. Theor. Comput. 2013, 9, 4462]. We introduce a DMRG wave function maximum overlap following technique to facilitate state-specific DMRG excited-state optimization. Using DMRG configuration interaction (DMRG-CI) gradients, we relax the low-lying singlet states of a series of trans-polyenes up to C20H22. Using the relaxed excited-state geometries, as well as correlation functions, we elucidate the exciton, soliton, and bimagnon (“single-fission”) character of the excited states, and find evidence for a planar conical intersection.

Motivated by recent work in density matrix embedding theory, we define exact link orbitals that capture all quantum mechanical (QM) effects across arbitrary quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) boundaries. Exact link orbitals are rigorously defined from the full QM solution, and their number is equal to the number of orbitals in the primary QM region. Truncating the exact set yields a smaller set of link orbitals optimal with respect to reproducing the primary region density matrix. We use the optimal link orbitals to obtain insight into the limits of QM/MM boundary treatments. We further analyze the popular general hybrid orbital (GHO) QM/MM boundary across a test suite of molecules. We find that GHOs are often good proxies for the most important optimal link orbital, although there is little detailed correlation between the detailed GHO composition and optimal link orbital valence weights. The optimal theory shows that anions and cations cannot be described by a single link orbital. However, expanding to include the second most important optimal link orbital in the boundary recovers an accurate description. The second optimal link orbital takes the chemically intuitive form of a donor or acceptor orbital for charge redistribution, suggesting that optimal link orbitals can be used as interpretative tools for electron transfer. We further find that two optimal link orbitals are also sufficient for boundaries that cut across double bonds. Finally, we suggest how to construct “approximately” optimal link orbitals for practical QM/MM calculations.