Assessment of Multireference Perturbation Methods for Chemical Reaction Barrier Heights

A few flavors of multireference perturbation theory, two variants of the n-electron valence state perturbation theory and two of the complete active space perturbation theory, are here tested for the calculation of barrier heights for the set of chemical reactions included in the DBH24/08 database, for which very accurate values are available. The comparison of the results obtained with these approaches with those already published for other theoretical models indicates that multireference perturbation theory is a valuable tool for the description of a chemical reaction. Moreover, limiting the comparison to the perturbation theory approaches, one observes that the bad behavior found for single reference methods (such as Møller–Plesset to second and fourth order in the energy) is markedly improved upon moving to the multireference generalizations.