Dalton is a powerful general‐purpose program system for the study of molecular electronic structure at the Hartree–Fock, Kohn–Sham, multiconfigurational self‐consistent‐field, Møller–Plesset, configuration‐interaction, and coupled‐cluster levels of theory. Apart from the total energy, a wide variety of molecular properties may be calculated using these electronic‐structure models. Molecular gradients and Hessians are available for geometry optimizations, molecular dynamics, and vibrational studies, whereas magnetic resonance and optical activity can be studied in a gauge‐origin‐invariant manner. Frequency‐dependent molecular properties can be calculated using linear, quadratic, and cubic response theory. A large number of singlet and triplet perturbation operators are available for the study of one‐, two‐, and three‐photon processes. Environmental effects may be included using various dielectric‐medium and quantum‐mechanics/molecular‐mechanics models. Large molecules may be studied using linear‐scaling and massively parallel algorithms. Dalton is distributed at no cost from http://www.daltonprogram.org for a number of UNIX platforms.This article is categorized under: Software > Quantum Chemistry

A benchmark set of 28 medium-sized organic molecules is assembled that covers the most important classes of chromophores including polyenes and other unsaturated aliphatic compounds, aromatic hydrocarbons, heterocycles, carbonyl compounds, and nucleobases. Vertical excitation energies and one-electron properties are computed for the valence excited states of these molecules using both multiconfigurational second-order perturbation theory, CASPT2, and a hierarchy of coupled cluster methods, CC2, CCSD, and CC3. The calculations are done at identical geometries $(\mathrm{MP}2∕6\text{-}31{\mathrm{G}}^{*})$ and with the same basis set (TZVP). In most cases, the CC3 results are very close to the CASPT2 results, whereas there are larger deviations with CC2 and CCSD, especially in singlet excited states that are not dominated by single excitations. Statistical evaluations of the calculated vertical excitation energies for 223 states are presented and discussed in order to assess the relative merits of the applied methods. CC2 reproduces the CC3 reference data for the singlets better than CCSD. On the basis of the current computational results and an extensive survey of the literature, we propose best estimates for the energies of 104 singlet and 63 triplet excited states.

Time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) and DFT-based multireference configuration interaction (DFT/MRCI) calculations are reported for a recently proposed benchmark set of 28 medium-sized organic molecules. Vertical excitation energies, oscillator strengths, and excited-state dipole moments are computed using the same geometries (MP2/6-31G∗) and basis set (TZVP) as in our previous ab initio benchmark study on electronically excited states. The results from TD-DFT (with the functionals BP86, B3LYP, and BHLYP) and from DFT/MRCI are compared against the previous high-level ab initio results, and, in particular, against the proposed best estimates for 104 singlet and 63 triplet vertical excitation energies. The statistical evaluation for the latter reference data gives the lowest mean absolute deviations for DFT/MRCI (0.22 eV for singlets and 0.24 eV for triplets) followed by TD-DFT/B3LYP (0.27 and 0.44 eV, respectively), whereas TD-DFT/BP86 and TD-DFT/BHLYP are significantly less accurate. The energies of singlet states with double excitation character are generally overestimated by TD-DFT, whereas triplet state energies are systematically underestimated by the currently investigated DFT-based methods.

The indirect nuclear spin–spin coupling constants of ${\mathrm{C}}_2{\mathrm{H}}_4,$ ${\mathrm{CH}}_2$ NH, ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{O,}$ and ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{S}$ were investigated by means of correlated ab initio calculations at the level of the second order polarization propagator approximation (SOPPA) and the second order polarization propagator approximation with coupled cluster singles and doubles amplitudes—SOPPA(CCSD) using large basis sets, which are optimized for the calculation of coupling constants. It is found that at the self-consistent-field (SCF) level ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{NH}$ and ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{S}$ exhibit triplet instabilities whereas ${\mathrm{CH}}_2{\mathrm{CH}}_2$ and ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{O}$ show triplet quasi-instabilities, which renders the SCF results meaningless. Our best results deviate between 0.3 and 2.7 Hz from the experimental values. We find that although the one-bond C–H and Y–H couplings as well as the two- and three-bond H–H couplings are dominated by the Fermi contact term, significant contributions of the orbital paramagnetic and sometimes even spin–dipolar terms are observed for the one-bond C–Y and two-bond C–H and Y–H coupling constants. Similarly the changes in the couplings caused by the electronegativity and the lone-pair of Y are mostly due to changes in the Fermi contact (all couplings) and the orbital paramagnetic contribution (C–Y and two-bond Y–H couplings). However, the trend in the changes are neither the same for both terms not for all couplings. In particular, the position of ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{S}$ in the series varies indicating that either the electronegativity or the lone pairs are the dominating perturbation. Furthermore, small but optimized Gaussian basis sets for the calculation of indirect nuclear spin–spin coupling constants are presented. They were obtained by contraction of the s- and p-type basis functions for C, N, O, and S and of the s-type basis functions for H of the large uncontracted basis sets. Molecular orbital coefficients of self-consistent-field calculations on ${\mathrm{CH}}_4,$ N${\mathrm{H}}_3,$ ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O,}$ ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{S,}$ and ${\mathrm{H}}_2$ with the uncontracted basis sets were used as contraction coefficients. Applied in the calculation of all coupling constants in ${\mathrm{C}}_2{\mathrm{H}}_4,$ ${\mathrm{CH}}_2$ NH, ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{O,}$ and ${\mathrm{CH}}_2\mathrm{S}$ the contraction leads to a maximum basis set error of $\text{∼0.5}$ Hz.

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.