The transition from the open minimum to the ring minimum on the ground state and on the lowest excited state of like symmetry in ozone: A configuration interaction study.

The metastable ring structure of the ozone 1(1)A1 ground state, which theoretical calculations have shown to exist, has so far eluded experimental detection. An accurate prediction for the energy difference between this isomer and the lower open structure is therefore of interest, as is a prediction for the isomerization barrier between them, which results from interactions between the lowest two (1)A1 states. In the present work, valence correlated energies of the 1(1)A1 state and the 2(1)A1 state were calculated at the 1(1)A1 open minimum, the 1(1)A1 ring minimum, the transition state between these two minima, the minimum of the 2(1)A1 state, and the conical intersection between the two states. The geometries were determined at the full-valence multi-configuration self-consistent-field level. Configuration interaction (CI) expansions up to quadruple excitations were calculated with triple-zeta atomic basis sets. The CI expansions based on eight different reference configuration spaces were explored. To obtain some of the quadruple excitation energies, the method of Correlation Energy Extrapolation by Intrinsic Scaling was generalized to the simultaneous extrapolation for two states. This extrapolation method was shown to be very accurate. On the other hand, none of the CI expansions were found to have converged to millihartree (mh) accuracy at the quadruple excitation level. The data suggest that convergence to mh accuracy is probably attained at the sextuple excitation level. On the 1(1)A1 state, the present calculations yield the estimates of (ring minimum-open minimum) ∼45-50 mh and (transition state-open minimum) ∼85-90 mh. For the (2(1)A1-(1)A1) excitation energy, the estimate of ∼130-170 mh is found at the open minimum and 270-310 mh at the ring minimum. At the transition state, the difference (2(1)A1-(1)A1) is found to be between 1 and 10 mh. The geometry of the transition state on the 1(1)A1 surface and that of the minimum on the 2(1)A1 surface nearly coincide. More accurate predictions of the energy differences also require CI expansions to at least sextuple excitations with respect to the valence space. For every wave function considered, the omission of the correlations of the 2s oxygen orbitals, which is a widely used approximation, was found to cause errors of about ±10 mh with respect to the energy differences.