How Important is Self-Consistency for the dDsC Density Dependent Dispersion Correction?

The treatment of dispersion interactions is ubiquitous but computationally demanding for seamless ab initio approaches. A highly popular and simple remedy consists in correcting for the missing interactions a posteriori by adding an attractive energy term summed over all atom pairs to standard density functional approximations.These corrections were originally based on atom pairwise parameters and, hence, had a strong touch of empiricism. To overcome such limitations, we recently proposed a robust system-dependent dispersion correction, dDsC, that is computed from the electron density and that provides a balanced description of both weak inter- and intramolecular interactions. From the theoretical point of view and for the sake of increasing reliability, we here verify if the self-consistent implementation of dDsC impacts ground-state properties such as interaction energies, electron density, dipole moments, geometries and harmonic frequencies. In addition, we investigate the suitability of the a posteriori scheme for molecular dynamics simulations, for which the analysis of the energy conservation constitutes a challenging test.