Communication: Configuration interaction combined with spin-projection for strongly correlated molecular electronic structures

Abstract

We present single and double particle-hole excitations in the recently revived spin-projected Hartree-Fock. Our motivation is to treat static correlation with spin-projection and recover the residual correlation, mostly dynamic in nature, with simple configuration interaction (CI). To this end, we introduce the Wick theorem for nonorthogonal determinants, which enables an efficient implementation in conjunction with the direct CI scheme. The proposed approach, termed spin-extended CI with singles and doubles, achieves a balanced treatment between dynamic and static correlations. To approximately account for the quadruple excitations, we also modify the well-known Davidson correction. We report that our approaches yield surprisingly accurate potential curves for HF, H2O, N2, and a hydrogen lattice, compared to traditional single reference wave function methods at the same computational scaling as regular CI.