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The cluster Jastrow antisymmetric geminal power ansatz was recently introduced as a promising approach for treating weak and strong electron correlations simultaneously. One crucial aspect of this ansatz is that the Jastrow operator allows the geminal power to achieve size consistency through the deletion of unphysical ionic terms. Here, we present data suggesting that the effects of such deletions go much deeper, causing the geminal to ‘intentionally’ take on a highly unphysical form that, in the presence of the Jastrow's deletions, nonetheless results in an accurate final wave function, a process that we note is similar to the variation-after-projection approach of projected Hartree–Fock theory. Indeed, in both LiF and N2, we show that the optimal geminal is quite unphysical if considered on its own, but in ways that the Jastrow easily corrects to yield a highly accurate final wave function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canonical transformation (CT) theory targets the description of dynamic correlation in multireference quantum chemistry problems. When combined with a static correlation quantum chemistry method, it enables the quantitative description of chemical processes involving electronic structure not described by a single electronic configuration. We argue that many multireference dynamic correlation methods display unsatisfactory characteristics, including lack of size-consistency, a low-order treatment of correlation, and a poor computational scaling. By contrast, CT theory is based on an exponential ansatz that is rigorously size-consistent, reduces in a single-reference limit to a coupled cluster theory, and has an n6 computational scaling with system and active space size. The efficient formulation of CT theory has allowed it to be applied to difficult systems in conjunction with active spaces with more than 30 orbitals, beyond the reach of traditional methods, with an accuracy that far exceeds multireference perturbation theories. Here we review the basic motivation, formulation, and implementation of CT theory, as well as survey some of our recent applications and possible future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]