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Welcome to the Website of CFOUR

CFOUR (Coupled-Cluster techniques for Computational Chemistry) is a program package for performing high-level quantum chemical calculations on atoms and molecules. The major strength of the program suite is its rather sophisticated arsenal of high-level ab initio methods for the calculation of atomic and molecular properties. Virtually all approaches based on Møller-Plesset (MP) perturbation theory and the coupled-cluster approximation (CC) are available; most of these have complementary analytic derivative approaches within the package as well.

Studies of excited electronic states and other "multireference" problems are possible using the equation-of-motion (EOM) coupled-cluster techniques. These techniques which are closely related to (and in some cases identical to) so-called Fock space multireference coupled-cluster theory, offer a powerful means to study open-shell systems and decided advantages when configuration mixing is important. At present, these include the EOMEE approach for singlet and triplet excited states, and the EOMIP and EOMEA methods that are best applied to low-spin doublet states. Analytic derivatives are available for these methods.

A number of methodological developments have been added to the program in the last two decades. These include: analytic second derivatives for all coupled-cluster approaches up to full CCSDT, the calculation of NMR chemical shifts at MP and CC levels of theory, the calculation of anharmonic force fields (via numerical differentation of analytic derivatives), relativistic corrections, corrections to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation at the CC level, nonadiabatic coupling within the EOM framework, and several others.

CFOUR is not a commercial code. It is rather a program that is undergoing development; new techniques and improvements are constantly being made (mainly in the groups of John F. Stanton (until the end of 2016 at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, now at the Quantum Theory Project of the University of Florida at Gainesville, USA) and Jürgen Gauss (Universität Mainz, Germany)).

For non-commercial purposes there is no charge to obtain CFOUR; one must simply sign a license agreement.

NEWS

  June    2020: A paper describing the history and the most important features of CFOUR has been published in  J. Chem. Phys.

April   2020: Upgrade of CFOUR website software.

July    2019: CFOUR v2.1 is available! This version includes numerous enhancements and stability improvements.

October 2017: Warning: Intel 2017 compilers have a serious bug affecting CFOUR, please use Intel 2016 or 2018.

March   2014: CFOUR V2.00beta is available for testing.
Please note that this is a public beta test, i.e. this version of CFOUR is not meant for real applications.

January 2011: The mailing list system/server has changed, all previous messages and subscribers have been transfered.

June    2010: The first production release is available.