An up-to-date overview of the CFOUR program system is given. After providing a brief outline of the evolution of the program since its inception in 1989, a comprehensive presentation is given of its well-known capabilities for high-level coupled-cluster theory and its application to molecular properties. Subsequent to this generally well-known background information, much of the remaining content focuses on lesser-known capabilities of CFOUR, most of which have become available to the public only recently or will become available in the near future. Each of these new features is illustrated by a representative example, with additional discussion targeted to educating users as to classes of applications that are now enabled by these capabilities. Finally, some speculation about future directions is given, and the mode of distribution and support for CFOUR are outlined.

Accurate methods for excited, ionized, and electron-attached states are critical to the study of many chemical species such as reactive intermediates, radicals, and ionized systems. The equation-of-motion coupled cluster singles, doubles, and triples (EOM-CCSDT) family of methods is very accurate (roughly similar in accuracy as for CCSDT calculations of the ground state), but the computational cost scales iteratively as the eighth power of the system size. Many approximations already exist, although most either correct only the excited state or require an iterative 𝒪(n⁷) procedure which can also be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, new methods, termed EOM-CCSD(T)(a) and EOM-CCSD(T)(a)*, are proposed which correct both the ground and excited states based on a shared effective Hamiltonian, and the latter of which includes only non-iterative corrections to both the CCSD and EOM-CCSD energies. These methods are found to significantly improve the description of excited and ionized potential energy surfaces, equilibrium geometries, and harmonic frequencies; the accuracy is very close to that of full EOM-CCSDT.

A number of iterative and perturbative approximations to the full equation-of-motion coupled cluster method with single, double, and triple excitations (EOM-CCSDT) are evaluated in the context of calculating the K-edge core-excitation and core-ionisation energies of several small molecules. Several of these methods are found to accurately reproduce the full EOM-CCSDT energies well, in particular the EOM-CCSD* method which, when using the core-valence separation (CVS) ansatz, scales rigorously with the sixth power of molecular size. These results highlight that very accurate core excitation and ionisation energies for molecules with first-row atoms can be computed at a cost not much larger than that for EOM-CCSD.

Community efforts in the computational molecular sciences (CMS) are evolving toward modular, open, and interoperable interfaces that work with existing community codes to provide more functionality and composability than could be achieved with a single program. The Quantum Chemistry Common Driver and Databases (QCDB) project provides such capability through an application programming interface (API) that facilitates interoperability across multiple quantum chemistry software packages. In tandem with the Molecular Sciences Software Institute and their Quantum Chemistry Archive ecosystem, the unique functionalities of several CMS programs are integrated, including CFOUR, GAMESS, NWChem, OpenMM, Psi4, Qcore, TeraChem, and Turbomole, to provide common computational functions, i.e., energy, gradient, and Hessian computations as well as molecular properties such as atomic charges and vibrational frequency analysis. Both standard users and power users benefit from adopting these APIs as they lower the language barrier of input styles and enable a standard layout of variables and data. These designs allow end-to-end interoperable programming of complex computations and provide best practices options by default.

A new method for generating fitting grids for least-squares tensor hypercontraction (LS-THC) is presented. This method draws inspiration from the related interpolative separable density fitting (ISDF) technique, but uses only a pivoted Cholesky decomposition of the metric matrix, S, already computed as a matter of course in LS-THC. The size and quality of the resulting grid is controlled by a user-defined cutoff parameter and the size of the starting grid. Additionally, the Cholesky-based method provides an alternative and possible more numerically stable method for performing the least-squares fit. The quality of the grids produced is evaluated for LS-DF-THC-MP2 calculations on retinal and benzene, the former with a large starting grid and small cc-pVDZ basis set, and the latter with a wide range of grids and basis sets. The error and grid size is found to be well-controlled by either the cutoff parameter (with a large starting grid) or the starting grid size (with a tight cutoff) and highly predictable. The Cholesky-based method is also able to generate unique grids tailored to different charge distributions, for example the (ab|, (ai|, and (ij| distributions that arise in the molecular orbital integrals. While only the (ai| grid directly affects the MP2 energy, the relative sizes of the other grids are examined.