A new internally contracted direct multiconfiguration–reference configuration interaction (MRCI) method is described which allows the use of much larger reference spaces than any previous MRCI method. The configurations with two electrons in the external orbital space are generated by applying pair excitation operators to the reference wave function as a whole, while the singly external and internal configurations are standard uncontracted spin eigenfunctions. A new efficient and simple method for the calculation of the coupling coefficients is used, which is well suited for vector machines, and allows the recalculation of all coupling coefficients each time they are needed. The vector H⋅c is computed partly in a nonorthogonal configuration basis. In order to test the accuracy of the internally contracted wave functions, benchmark calculations have been performed for F⁻, H₂O, NH₂, CH₂, CH₃, OH, NO, N₂, and O₂ at various geometries. The deviations of the energies obtained with internally contracted and uncontracted MRCI wave functions are mostly smaller than 1 mH and typically 3–5 times smaller than the deviations between the uncontracted MRCI and the full CI. Dipole moments, electric dipole polarizabilities, and electronic dipole transition moments calculated with uncontracted and contracted MRCI wave functions also are found to be in close agreement. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated in large scale calculations for the CN, NH₃, CO₂, and Cr₂ molecules. In these calculations up to 3088 reference configurations and up to 154 orbitals were employed. The biggest calculation is equivalent to an uncontracted MRCI with more than 78 million configurations.

The coupled cluster method restricted to single and double excitations (CCSD) is considered for the case of a spin restricted Hartree–Fock open shell reference determinant. A spin–orbital based formulation, in which the cluster operator spans exactly the minimal first order interacting space, is presented, and computationally optimal working equations are given. In the limit of a large number of closed shell orbitals, the cost is identical to that of an optimum treatment of an equivalent closed shell problem, which is obtained as a special case of the formulation presented. The theory is applied to the calculation of a number of diatomic potential energy functions and compared with spin-unrestricted theory.

Molpro is a general purpose quantum chemistry software package with a long development history. It was originally focused on accurate wavefunction calculations for small molecules but now has many additional distinctive capabilities that include, inter alia, local correlation approximations combined with explicit correlation, highly efficient implementations of single-reference correlation methods, robust and efficient multireference methods for large molecules, projection embedding, and anharmonic vibrational spectra. In addition to conventional input-file specification of calculations, Molpro calculations can now be specified and analyzed via a new graphical user interface and through a Python framework.

An efficient method for the calculation of Breit-Pauli spin-orbit matrix elements for internally contracted multireference configuration interaction wavefunctions is presented. Instead of taking all two-electron contributions of the wavefunction explicitly into account, the most important two-electron contributions of the spin-orbit operator are incorporated by means of an effective one-electron Fock operator. As a further refinement, explicit two-electron contributions can be reinstated for the dominant all-internal parts of the wavefunctions.