Density functional benchmark for quadruple hydrogen bonds

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ahmed, Usman, Johansson, Mikael P., Lehtola, Susi, Sundholm, Dage
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ahmed, Usman
Johansson, Mikael P.
Lehtola, Susi
Sundholm, Dage
author_facet Ahmed, Usman
Johansson, Mikael P.
Lehtola, Susi
Sundholm, Dage
contents Hydrogen bonding is an important non-covalent interaction that plays a major role in molecular self-organization and supramolecular structures. It can be described accurately with ab initio quantum chemical wave function methods, which become computationally expensive for large molecular assemblies. Density functional theory (DFT) offers a better balance between accuracy and computational cost, and can be routinely applied to large systems. A large number of density functional approximations (DFAs) has been developed, but their accuracy depend on the application, necessitating benchmark studies to guide their selection for use in applications. Some of us have recently determined highly accurate hydrogen bonding energies of 14 quadruply hydrogen-bonded dimers by extrapolating coupled-cluster energies to the complete basis set limit as well as extrapolating electron correlation contributions with a continued-fraction approach [U. Ahmed et al, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2024, 26, 24470]. In this work, we study the reproduction of these bonding energies at the DFT level using 152 DFAs. The top ten functionals are composed of eight variants of the Berkeley functionals both with and without dispersion corrections, and two Minnesota 2011 functionals augmented with a further dispersion correction. We find the B97M-V functional with the non-local correlation functional replaced by an empirical D3BJ dispersion correction to be the best functional, while changes to the dispersion part in other Berkeley functionals lead to poorer performance in our study.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_02423
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Density functional benchmark for quadruple hydrogen bonds
Ahmed, Usman
Johansson, Mikael P.
Lehtola, Susi
Sundholm, Dage
Chemical Physics
Hydrogen bonding is an important non-covalent interaction that plays a major role in molecular self-organization and supramolecular structures. It can be described accurately with ab initio quantum chemical wave function methods, which become computationally expensive for large molecular assemblies. Density functional theory (DFT) offers a better balance between accuracy and computational cost, and can be routinely applied to large systems. A large number of density functional approximations (DFAs) has been developed, but their accuracy depend on the application, necessitating benchmark studies to guide their selection for use in applications. Some of us have recently determined highly accurate hydrogen bonding energies of 14 quadruply hydrogen-bonded dimers by extrapolating coupled-cluster energies to the complete basis set limit as well as extrapolating electron correlation contributions with a continued-fraction approach [U. Ahmed et al, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2024, 26, 24470]. In this work, we study the reproduction of these bonding energies at the DFT level using 152 DFAs. The top ten functionals are composed of eight variants of the Berkeley functionals both with and without dispersion corrections, and two Minnesota 2011 functionals augmented with a further dispersion correction. We find the B97M-V functional with the non-local correlation functional replaced by an empirical D3BJ dispersion correction to be the best functional, while changes to the dispersion part in other Berkeley functionals lead to poorer performance in our study.
title Density functional benchmark for quadruple hydrogen bonds
topic Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02423