A new way of fitting ab initio values of the potential energy of triatomic molecules is discussed. The new functional form proposed for the potential energy function satisfies several criteria for use in scattering calculations and it is so stable that, when increasing the number of parameters in the fit, it maintains a good behavior at short, intermediate, and long range of the whole potential. Applications of the fitting technique to obtain the potential energy functions for the ground states of H₃, H₂He⁺, and LiHF are presented. For the H₃ system, we fit all 267 of Liu and Siegbahn’s ab initio points. With one nonlinear parameter and 23 linear parameters, the root‐mean‐square error was 1.21 kcal/mol and the maximum absolute deviation 7.94 kcal/mol; these values are lower than previous global fittings with a similar number of parameters except for the Truhlar and Horowitz fit of the Liu and Siegbahn data, LSTH potential, but when the number of linear parameters was increased to 71, the root‐mean‐square error was reduced to 0.07 kcal/mol and the maximum absolute deviation to 0.25 kcal/mol (approximately one half the corresponding values of the LSTH ones). The new global fitting procedure is then applied to obtain potential energy functions for the H₂He⁺ and the LiHF systems within the chemical accuracy of 1 kcal/mol.

Adiabatic global potential energy surfaces, for singlet and triplet states of A′ and A″ symmetries, were computed for an extensive grid for a total of 8469 conformations of H3+ system at full configuration interaction ab initio level and using an extended basis set that has also been optimized for excited states. An accurate (root-mean-square error lower than 20 cm−1) global fit to the ground-state potential is obtained using a diatomics-in-molecules approach corrected by several symmetrized three-body terms with a total of 96 linear parameters and 3 nonlinear parameters. This produces an accurate global potential which represents all aspects of ground-state H3+ including the absolute minimum, the avoided crossing and dissociation limits, satisfying the correct symmetry properties of the system. The rovibrational eigenstates have been calculated up to total angular momentum J=20 using hyperspherical coordinates with symmetry adapted basis functions. The infrared spectra thus reproduced is within 1 cm−1 with respect to the experimental values for several transitions.

A new embedding method to include local correlation in large systems is proposed. In this method the density of the whole system, calculated via density functional theory approaches, is partitioned in two pieces, one corresponding to the subsystem of interest and the rest to the environment. In the second step, an embedding potential is obtained iteratively using as a driving force the self-repulsion due to the density difference, in a similar form as proposed by Zhao et al. [Phys. Rev. A 50, 2138 (1994)], to obtain the “exact” exchange-correlation functional. Such potential is added to the Fock equation to build the localized molecular orbitals which are further used to include the local electronic correlation in the subsystem of interest. This method is an alternative to the previous DFT-based embedding methods first proposed by Wesolowski and Washell [J. Phys. Chem. 97, 8050 (1993)] and after enhanced by Govind et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 110, 7677 (1999)] and adapted to metal extended systems, which use density functionals to describe the kinetic energy contribution to the embedding potential, whose precise form has been largely treated in the literature and its crucial role is discussed here. The method is applied to hydrogen chains and its van der Waals interaction with ${\text{H}}_2$ . The results obtained are in very good agreement with exact calculations performed on the whole system, which demonstrates that the method proposed is a very promising route to introduce correlation in large systems.

In this paper, we have computed the rovibrational spectrum of the H3+ molecule using a new global potential energy surface, invariant under all permutations of the nuclei, that includes the long range electrostatic interactions analytically. The energy levels are obtained by a variational calculation using hyperspherical coordinates. From the comparison with available experimental results for low lying levels, we conclude that our accuracy is of the order of 0.1cm−1 for states localized in the vicinity of equilateral triangular configurations of the nuclei, and changes to the order of 1cm−1 when the system is distorted away from equilateral configurations. Full rovibrational spectra up to the H++H2 dissociation energy limit have been computed. The statistical properties of this spectrum (nearest neighbor distribution and spectral rigidity) show the quantum signature of classical chaos and are consistent with random matrix theory. On the other hand, the correlation function, even when convoluted with a smoothing function, exhibits oscillations which are not described by random matrix theory. We discuss a possible similarity between these oscillations and the ones observed experimentally.