An effective energy gradient expression for divide-and-conquer second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory

We recently proposed a linear-scaling evaluation scheme for the second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation (MP2) energy based on the divide-and-conquer (DC) method [M. Kobayashi, Y. Imamura, and H. Nakai, J. Chem. Phys. 127, 074103 (2007)10.1063/1.2761878]. In this paper, we propose an approximate but effective expression for the first derivative of the DC-MP2 energy. The present scheme evaluates the one- and two-body density matrices, which appear in the MP2 gradient formula, in the DC manner; that is, the entire matrix is obtained as the sum of subsystem matrices masked by the partition matrix. Therefore, the method requires solving only the local Z-vector equations. Illustrative applications to three types of systems, peptides, Si surface model, and delocalized polyenes, reveal the effectiveness of the present method.