Efficient model chemistries for peptides. I. General framework and a study of the heterolevel approximation in RHF and MP2 with Pople split-valence basis sets

We present an exhaustive study of more than 250 ab initio potential energy surfaces (PESs) of the model dipeptide HCO-L-Ala-NH(2). The model chemistries (MCs) investigated are constructed as homo- and heterolevels involving possibly different RHF and MP2 calculations for the geometry and the energy. The basis sets used belong to a sample of 39 representants from Pople's split-valence families, ranging from the small 3-21G to the large 6-311++G(2df,2pd). The reference PES to which the rest are compared is the MP2/6-311++G(2df,2pd) homolevel, which, as far as we are aware, is the most accurate PES in the literature. All data sets have been analyzed according to a general framework, which can be extended to other complex problems and which captures the nearness concept in the space of MCs. The great number of MCs evaluated has allowed us to significantly explore this space and show that the correlation between accuracy and computational cost of the methods is imperfect, thus justifying a systematic search for the combination of features in a MC that is optimal to deal with peptides. Regarding the particular MCs studied, the most important conclusion is that the potentially very cost-saving heterolevel approximation is a very efficient one to describe the whole PES of HCO-L-Ala-NH(2). Finally, we show that, although RHF may be used to calculate the geometry if a MP2 single-point energy calculation follows, pure RHF//RHF homolevels are not recommendable for this problem.