Is the Bethe–Salpeter Formalism Accurate for Excitation Energies? Comparisons with TD-DFT, CASPT2, and EOM-CCSD

Developing ab initio approaches able to provide accurate excited-state energies at a reasonable computational cost is one of the biggest challenges in theoretical chemistry. In that framework, the Bethe-Salpeter equation approach, combined with the GW exchange-correlation self-energy, which maintains the same scaling with system size as TD-DFT, has recently been the focus of a rapidly increasing number of applications in molecular chemistry. Using a recently proposed set encompassing excitation energies of many kinds [J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2016, 7, 586-591], we investigate here the performances of BSE/GW. We compare these results to CASPT2, EOM-CCSD, and TD-DFT data and show that BSE/GW provides an accuracy comparable to the two wave function methods. It is particularly remarkable that the BSE/GW is equally efficient for valence, Rydberg, and charge-transfer excitations. In contrast, it provides a poor description of triplet excited states, for which EOM-CCSD and CASPT2 clearly outperform BSE/GW. This contribution therefore supports the use of the Bethe-Salpeter approach for spin-conserving transitions.