Intermolecular interaction energies from fourth order many-body perturbation theory. Impact of individual electron correlation contributions.

The performance of Møller-Plesset perturbation theory methods for describing intermolecular interaction energies has been investigated with the focus on illuminating the impact of individual electron correlation energy contributions in fourth order. It is shown that a physically meaningful decomposition of the fourth order correlation energy can be obtained by grouping individual correlation energy terms that share the same diagrammatic loop structure. This decomposition of the fourth order singles (S), doubles (D), triples (T), and quadruples (Q) terms revealed that individual terms from each excitation class can have a huge impact on the energy that is much larger than the total fourth order correlation contribution. A partial summation of S, D, and Q terms has been derived that can reproduce the full fourth order interaction energies with a good accuracy and which does not include the computationally expensive triples energy term.