Adiabatic Connection Methods Applied to Molecular Crystals
Publication date: 11 Mar 2026
We extend adiabatic connection models (ACMs) derived from the Møller-Plesset adiabatic connection (MPAC) formalism, previously applied only to finite systems, to periodic molecular crystals. Lattice energies for 19 representative systems are computed and compared with periodic MP2, high-level reference, and experimental data. The tested ACMs achieve accuracies comparable to state-of-the-art dispersioncorrected hybrid density functionals and come close to those of correlated wave-function methods. Among them, the HFAC24 model, which is a post-Hartree-Fock parameterfree correlation expression that correctly recovers both the uniform-electron-gas and strong-interaction limits, is the only one with accurate binding energies and accuarate total energies. The results in this work demonstrate that MPAC-based ACMs provide 1 an accurate and transferable framework for modeling molecular-crystal energetics and represent a robust, systematically improvable route for developing correlation models for extended systems.