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Adaptive Density-Guided Approach to Double Incremental Potential Energy Surface Construction

We present a combination of the recently developed double incremental expansion of potential energy surfaces with the well-established adaptive density-guided approach to grid construction. This unique methodology is based on the use of an incremental expansion for potential energy surfaces, known as n-mode expansion, an incremental many-body representation of the electronic energy, and an efficient vibrational density-guided approach to automated determination of grid dimensions and granularity. The reliability of the method is validated calculating potential energy surfaces and obtaining fundamental excitation energies for three moderate-size chain-like molecular systems. The results are compared to other approaches, which utilize static grid construction for supersystem and fragmentation calculation setups. The use of our methodology leads to considerable computational savings for potential energy surface construction and a major reduction in the number of required single point calculations can be achieved, while maintaining a high level of accuracy in the resulting potential energy surfaces. Additional investigations indicate that our method can be applied to covalently bound and strongly interacting molecular systems, even though these cases are known as being very unfavorable for fragmentation schemes. We therefore conclude that the presented methodology is a robust and flexible approach to potential energy surface construction, which introduces considerable computational savings without compromising the accuracy of vibrational spectra calculations.