Chemically Accurate 0-0 Energies with not-so-Accurate Excited State Geometries

Abstract: Using a series of increasingly refined wavefunction methods able to tackle electronic excited states, namely ADC(2), CC2, CCSD, CCSDR(3) and CC3, we investigate the interplay between geometries and 0-0 energies. We show that, due to a strong and nearly systematic error cancelation between the vertical transition and geometrical reorganization energies, CC2 and CCSD structures can be used to obtain chemically-accurate 0-0 energies, though the underlying geometries are rather far from the reference ones and would deliver significant errors for many chemical and physical properties. This indicates that obtaining 0-0 energies matching experiment does not demonstrate the quality of the geometrical parameters. In contrast, accurate computation of vertical excitation energies is mandatory in order to reach chemical accuracy. By determining CC3 total energies on CCSD structures, we model a large set of compounds (including radicals) and electronic transitions (including singlet-triplet excitations) and successfully reach chemical accuracy in a near systematic way. Indeed, for this particular set, our protocol delivers a mean absolute error as small as $0.032$ eV, chemical accuracy (error smaller than $1$ kcal.mol$^{-1}$ or $0.043$ eV) being obtained in 80\%\ of the cases. In only three cases the error exceeds $0.15$ eV which is of the order of the typical error provided by TD-DFT or second-order wavefunction methods for this particular property. The present composite protocol is therefore very effective despite the fact that the geometries may not be considered as very accurate.