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The selective adsorption of light alkane over alkene on ZIF-7 provides a new insight for the separation of small-sized molecules with similar physical properties. To gain a comprehensive understand...

The room temperature pump-probe X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) measurements used for serial femtosecond crystallography provide remarkable information about the structures of the catalytic (S-state) intermediates of the oxygen-evolution reaction of photosystem II. However, mixed populations of these intermediates and moderate resolution limit the interpretation of the data from current experiments. The S3 XFEL structures show extra density near the OEC that may correspond to a water/hydroxide molecule. However, in the latest structure, this additional oxygen is 2.08 Å from the Oε2 of D1-E189, which is closer than the sum of the van der Waals radii of the two oxygens. Here, we use Boltzmann statistics and Monte Carlo sampling to provide a model for the S2-to-S3 state transition, allowing structural changes and the insertion of an additional water/hydroxide. Based on our model, water/hydroxide addition to the oxygen-evolving complex (OEC) is not thermodynamically favorable in the S2g = 2 state, but it is in the S2g = 4.1 redox isomer. Thus, formation of the S3 state starts by a transition from the S2g = 2 to the S2g = 4.1 structure. Then, electrostatic interactions support protonation of D1-H190 and deprotonation of the Ca2+-ligated water (W3) with proton loss to the lumen. The W3 hydroxide moves toward Mn4, completing the coordination shell of Mn4 and favoring its oxidation to Mn(iv) in the S3 state. In addition, binding an additional hydroxide to Mn1 leads to a conformational change of D1-E189 in the S2g = 4.1 and S3 structures. In the S3 state a fraction of D1-E189 release from Mn1 and bind a proton.

The design and development of materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion devices requires fundamental understanding of chemical interactions at electrode/electrolyte interfaces. For Li–S batteries that hold the promise for outperforming the current generation of Li ion batteries, the interactions of lithium polysulfide (LPS) intermediates with the electrode surface strongly influence the efficiency and cycle life of the sulfur cathode. While metal oxides have been demonstrated to be useful in trapping LPS, the actual binding modes of LPS on 3d transition metal oxides and their dependence on the metal element identity across the periodic table remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate the chemical interactions between LPS and oxides of Mn, Fe, Co, and Cu by combining X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations. We find that Li–O interactions dominate LPS binding to the oxides (Mn3O4, Fe2O3, and Co3O4), with increasing strength from Mn to Fe to Co. For C...

We present a new method for fitting potential energy surfaces in molecular-mechanics-like internal coordinates based on data from electronic structure calculations. The method should be applicable to chemical reactions involving either bond dissociation or isomerization and is illustrated here for bond dissociation, in particular the breaking of an O-H bond in methanol and the breaking of an N-H bond in dimethylamine. As compared to previously available systematic methods for fitting global potential energy surfaces, it extends the maximum size of the system than can be treated by at least an order of magnitude.

We propose a new scheme for the direct diabatization of MC-QDPT wave functions. Our new scheme utilizes CASSCF diabatic molecular orbitals (DMOs); this is conceptually simpler than the previous approach and can lead to smoother diabatic potentials. We validated the new diabatization scheme, in comparison to CASSCF diabatization and to the original MC-QDPT diabatization scheme, for two test cases, the dissociation of LiF and the reaction of Li + FH → LiF + H. The results with our new scheme suggest that the new scheme with CASSCF DMOs would be a good choice for nonadiabatic dynamics studies in the future.

We examine the accuracy of single-reference and multireference correlated wave function methods for predicting accurate energies and potential energy curves of biradicals. The biradicals considered are intermediate species along the bond dissociation coordinates for breaking the F-F bond in F2, the O-O bond in H2O2, and the C-C bond in CH3CH3. We apply a host of single-reference and multireference approximations in a consistent way to the same cases to provide a better assessment of their relative accuracies than was previously possible. The most accurate method studied is coupled cluster theory with all connected excitations through quadruples, CCSDTQ. Without explicit quadruple excitations, the most accurate potential energy curves are obtained by the single-reference RCCSDt method, followed, in order of decreasing accuracy, by UCCSDT, RCCSDT, UCCSDt, seven multireference methods, including perturbation theory, configuration interaction, and coupled-cluster methods (with MRCI+Q being the best and Mk-MR-CCSD the least accurate), four CCSD(T) methods, and then CCSD.

Complete-active-space self-consistent-field (CASSCF) calculations provide useful reference wave functions for configuration interaction or perturbation theory calculations of excited-state potential energy surfaces including dynamical electron correlation. However, the canonical molecular orbitals (MOs) of CASSCF calculations usually have mixed character in regions of strong interaction of two or more electronic states; therefore, they are unsuitable for diabatization using the configurational uniformity approach. Here, CASSCF diabatic MOs for phenol have been obtained by the 4-fold way, and comparison to the CASSCF canonical MOs shows that they are much smoother. Using these smooth CASSCF diabatic MOs, we performed direct diabatization calculations for the three low-lying states ((1)ππ, (1)ππ*, and (1)πσ*) and their diabatic (scalar) couplings at the dynamically correlated multiconfiguration quasidegenerate perturbation theory (MC-QDPT) level. We present calculations along the O-H stretching and C-C-O-H torsion coordinates for the nonadiabatic photodissociation of phenol to the phenoxyl radical and hydrogen atom. The seams of (1)ππ*/(1)πσ* and (1)ππ/(1)πσ* diabatic crossings are plotted as functions of these coordinates. We also present diabatization calculations for displacements along the out-of-plane ring distortion modes 16a and 16b of the phenyl group. The dominant coupling modes of the two conical intersections ((1)ππ*/(1)πσ* and (1)ππ/(1)πσ*) are discussed. The present diabatization method is confirmed to be valid even for significantly distorted ring structures by diabatization calculations along a reaction path connecting the planar equilibrium geometry of phenol to its strongly distorted prefulvenic form. The present work provides insight into the mode specificity of phenol photodissociation and shows that diabatization at the MC-QDPT level employing CASSCF diabatic MOs can be a good starting point for multidimensional dynamics calculations of photochemical reactions.

Conventional time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) is based on a closed-shell Kohn-Sham (KS) singlet ground state with the adiabatic approximation, using either linear response (KS-LR) or the Tamm-Dancoff approximation (KS-TDA); these methods can only directly predict singly excited states. This deficiency can be overcome by using a triplet state as the reference in the KS-TDA approximation and "exciting" the singlet by a spin flip (SF) from the triplet; this is the method suggested by Krylov and co-workers, and we abbreviate this procedure as SF-KS-TDA. SF-KS-TDA can be applied either with the original collinear kernel of Krylov and co-workers or with a noncollinear kernel, as suggested by Wang and Ziegler. The SF-KS-TDA method does bring some new practical difficulties into play, but it can at least formally model doubly excited states and states with double-excitation character, so it might be more useful than conventional TDDFT (both KS-LR and KS-TDA) for photochemistry if these additional difficulties can be surmounted and if it is accurate with existing approximate exchange-correlation functionals. In the present work, we carried out calculations specifically designed to understand better the accuracy and limitations of the conventional TDDFT and SF-KS-TDA methods; we did this by studying closed-shell atoms and closed-shell monatomic cations because they provide a simple but challenging testing ground for what we might expect in studying the photochemistry of molecules with closed-shell ground states. To test their accuracy, we applied conventional KS-LR and KS-TDA and 18 versions of SF-KS-TDA (nine collinear and nine noncollinear) to the same set of vertical excitation energies (including both Rydberg and valence excitations) of Be, B(+), Ne, Na(+), Mg, and Al(+). We did this for 10 exchange-correlation functionals of various types, both local and nonlocal. We found that the GVWN5 and M06 functionals with nonlocal kernels in spin-flip calculations can both have accuracy competitive to CASPT2 calculations. When the results were averaged over all 36 test energy differences, seven (GVWN5, M06, B3PW91, LRC-ωPBE, LRC-ωPBEh, PBE, and M06-2X) of the 10 studied density functionals had smaller mean unsigned errors for noncollinear calculations than the mean unsigned error of the best functional (M06-2X) for either conventional KS-TDA or KS-LR.

The 3d-series transition metals (also called the fourth-period transition metals), Sc to Zn, are very important in industry and biology, but they provide unique challenges to computing the electronic structure of their compounds. In order to successfully describe the compounds by theory, one must be able to describe their components, in particular the constituent atoms and cations. In order to understand the ingredients required for successful computations with density functional theory, it is useful to examine the performance of various exchange-correlation functionals; we do this here for 4s(N)3d(N') transition-metal atoms and their cations. We analyze the results using three ways to compute the energy of the open-shell states: the direct variational method, the weighted-averaged broken symmetry (WABS) method, and a new broken-symmetry method called the reinterpreted broken symmetry (RBS) method. We find the RBS method to be comparable in accuracy with the WABS method. By examining the overall accuracy in treating 18 multiplicity-changing excitations and 10 ionization potentials with the RBS method, 10 functionals are found to have a mean-unsigned error of5 kcal/mol, with ωB97X-D topping the list. For local density functionals, which are more practical for extended systems, the M06-L functional is the most accurate. And by combining the results with our previous studies of p-block and 4d-series elements as well as databases for alkyl bond dissociation, main-group atomization energies, and π-π noncovalent interactions, we find five functionals, namely, PW6B95, MPW1B95, M08-SO, SOGGA11-X, and MPWB1K, to be highly recommended. We also studied the performance of PW86 and C09 exchange functionals, which have drawn wide interest in recent studies due to their claimed ability to reproduce Hartree-Fock exchange at long distance. By combining them with four correlation functionals, we find the performance of the resulting functionals disappointing both for 3d transition-metal chemistry and in broader tests, and thus we do not recommend PW86 and C09 as components of generalized gradient approximations for general application.

We present global ground-state potential energy surfaces for the quintet and singlet spin states of the O4 system that are suitable for treating high-energy vibrational-rotational energy transfer and collision-induced dissociation in electronically adiabatic, spin-conserving O2–O2 collisions. The surfaces are based on MS-CASPT2/maug-cc-pVTZ electronic structure calculations with scaled external correlation. The active space has 16 electrons in 12 orbitals. The calculations cover nine kinds of geometrical arrangements corresponding to dissociative diatom-diatom collisions of O2, geometries corresponding to O3–O, geometries identified by running trajectories, and geometries along linear synchronous transit paths. The global ground-state potential energy surfaces were obtained by a many-body approach with an accurate O–O pairwise interaction and a fit of the many-body interaction to 12 684 electronic structure data points for the singlet and 10 543 electronic structure data points for the quintet. The many-b...

A database containing 17 multiplicity-changing valence and Rydberg excitation energies of p-block elements is used to test the performance of density functional theory (DFT) with approximate density functionals for calculating relative energies of spin states. We consider only systems where both the low-spin and high-spin state are well described by a single Slater determinant, thereby avoiding complications due to broken-symmetry solutions. Because the excitations studied involve a spin change, they require a balanced treatment of exchange and correlation, thus providing a hard test for approximate density functionals. We test three formalisms for predicting the multiplicity-changing transition energies. First is the ΔSCF method; we also test time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), both in its conventional form starting from the low-spin state and in its collinear spin-flip form starting from the high-spin state. Very diffuse basis functions are needed to give a qualitatively correct description of the Rydberg excitations. The scalar relativistic effect needs to be considered when quantitative results are desired, and we include it in the comparisons. With the ΔSCF method, most of the tested functionals give mean unsigned errors (MUEs) larger than 6 kcal/mol for valence excitations and MUEs larger than 3 kcal/mol for Rydberg excitations, but the performance for the Rydberg states is much better than can be obtained with time-dependent DFT. It is surprising to see that the long-range corrected functionals, which have 100% Hartree-Fock exchange at large inter-electronic distance, do not improve the performance for Rydberg excitations. Among all tested density functionals, ΔSCF calculations with the O3LYP, M08-HX, and OLYP functionals give the best overall performance for both valence and Rydberg excitations, with MUEs of 2.1, 2.6, and 2.7 kcal/mol, respectively. This is very encouraging since the MUE of the CCSD(T) coupled cluster method with quintuple zeta basis sets is 2.0 kcal/mol; however, caution is advised since many popular density functionals give poor results, and there can be very significant differences between the ΔSCF predictions and those from TDDFT.

We present a global ground-state potential energy surface for N4 suitable for treating high-energy vibrational-rotational energy transfer and collision-induced dissociation in N2-N2 collisions. To obtain the surface, complete active space second-order perturbation theory calculations were performed for the ground singlet state with an active space of 12 electrons in 12 orbitals and the maug-cc-pVTZ triple zeta basis set. About 17,000 ab initio data points have been calculated for the N4 system, distributed along nine series of N2 + N2 geometries and three series of N3 + N geometries. The six-dimensional ground-state potential energy surface is fitted using least-squares fits to the many-body component of the electronic energies based on permutationally invariant polynomials in bond order variables.

Thirty four density functional approximations are tested against two diverse databases, one with 18 bond energies and one with 24 barriers. These two databases are chosen to include bond energies and barrier heights which are relevant to catalysis, and in particular the bond energy database includes metal-metal bonds, metal-ligand bonds, alkyl bond dissociation energies, and atomization energies of small main group molecules. Two revised versions of the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) functional, namely the RPBE and revPBE functionals, widely used for catalysis, do improve the performance of PBE against the two diverse databases, but give worse results than B3LYP (which denotes the combination of Becke's 3-parameter hybrid treatment with Lee-Yang-Parr correlation functional). Our results show that the Minnesota functionals, M05, M06, and M06-L give the best performance for the two diverse databases, which suggests that they deserve more attention for applications to catalysis. We also obtain notably good performance with the tau-HCTHhyb, omegaB97X-D, and MOHLYP functional (where MOHLYP denotes the combination of the OptX exchange functional as modified by Schultz, Zhao, and Truhlar with half of the LYP correlation functional).