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It is commonly believed that organic molecules are physisorbed on the ideal nonpolar surfaces of wide band gap insulators with limited variation in the electronic properties of the adsorbate molecule. On the basis of first principles calculations within density functional theory (DFT) and GW approximation, we show that this is not generally true. We find that the molecular frontier orbitals undergo significant changes when a hydroxy acid (here we chose gluconic acid) is adsorbed on MgSO4 H2 O (100) surface due to the complex interaction between the molecule and the insulating surface. The predicted trend of the adsorption effect on the energy gap obtained by DFT is reversed when the surface polarization effect is taken into account via the many-body corrections. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.

The interaction of ferrocene- 1, 1' -dithiol (FDT) with two parallel Ag(111) surfaces has been theoretically studied at density-functional level. The effect of surface defects on the energetic and electronic structure was investigated. The electronic transport properties are studied with the nonequilibrium Green's function approach. The adsorption geometry has a strong effect on the electronic levels and conductivity. The presence of point defects strongly enhances the molecule-surface interaction but has a surprisingly small effect on the density of states near the Fermi energy. The FDT-surface bond is particularly strong near terraces or steps and leads to significant shifts of the molecular orbitals relative to the gas phase. For all considered defect types except the single adatom the electronic conductivity through the FDT molecule is decreased compared to adsorption on perfect surfaces. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.

Using density functional theory we perform theoretical investigations of the electronic properties of a freestanding one-dimensional organometallic vanadium-benzene wire. This system represents the limiting case of multidecker V-n(C6H6)(n+1) clusters which can be synthesized with established methods. We predict that the ground state of the wire is a 100% spin-polarized ferromagnet (half-metal). Its density of states is metallic at the Fermi energy for the minority electrons and shows a semiconductor gap for the majority electrons. We find that the half-metallic behavior is conserved up to 12% longitudinal elongation of the wire. Ab initio electron transport calculations reveal that finite size vanadium-benzene clusters coupled to ferromagnetic Ni or Co electrodes will work as nearly perfect spin filters.

The adsorption of NO molecules on the perfect and defective (110) surfaces of SnO2 was studied with first-principles methods at the density-functional theory level. It was found that NO mainly interacts via the nitrogen atom with the bridging oxygens of the stoichiometric surface while the coordinatively unsaturated surface Sn atoms are less reactive. On the oxygen-deficient surface, NO is preferentially adsorbed at the vacancy positions, with the nitrogen atom close to the former surface oxygen site. Regardless of the adsorption site, the unpaired electron is located mainly on the NO molecule and only partly on surface Sn atoms. The results for the SnO2 surface are compared to literature results on the isostructural TiO2 rutile (110) surface.

Recent experimental results (Hoeft et al 2001 Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 086101) have questioned the capability of current theoretical methods for describing the bonding of NH3, CO, and NO with the NiO(100) surface. We show that these systems do indeed represent a challenge to theory. For different reasons, density functional theory (DFT) fails in describing the bonding of these molecules to the NiO surface. The gradient-corrected functionals which work better for the properties of NH3/NiO and CO/NiO (energies, geometries, vibrations) provide wrong answers for NO/NiO and vice versa. This is not due to the well-known difficulty as regards DFT describing the insulating character of NiO. In fact, exactly the same problem is found for isolated Ni2+ impurities in MgO. A correct description of the bonding of both closed-shell (NH3 and CO) and open-shell (NO) molecules to NixMg1-xO is obtained only after inclusion of dynamical correlation and dispersion forces via wavefunction-based methods. However, even with correlated calculations some uncertainties exist regarding the predicted value of the energy of adsorption of NO on NiO. While CASPT2 calculations reach reasonable agreement with experiment, the results of approximate coupled-cluster calculations (the multi-configuration coupled-electron-pair approach) substantially underestimate the adsorption energy.

The NO/NiO(100) system represents an excellent test case for the theory of surface chemical bond since accurate information about geometry, adsorption strength, and spin properties is available from experiments performed on NiO and Ni-doped MgO powders, single crystals, and thin films. We used cluster models to describe the NO/NiO interaction in combination with density functional theory (DFT) and wave function-based methods. We have identified four major aspects of the interaction: (1) the bonding cannot be described by a single determinant; (2) a spin-polarized DF-B3LYP approach gives reasonable adsorption properties at the price of a physically incorrect spin distribution; (3) a key ingredient of the interaction is the Coulomb repulsion within the Ni 3d shell; since this term is described very differently depending on the exchange-correlation functional it can result in overbound generalized gradient approach or Becke, Lee, Yang, and Parr or in strongly unbound (HFLYP) systems depending on the DFT approach; (4) the proper inclusion of the dynamical correlation is essential to treat the on-site Coulomb repulsion within the Ni 3d shell and to provide an accurate bond strength. In fact, the explicitly correlated complete-active-space second-order perturbation theory method gives results in overall agreement with the experiment. This shows the importance of treating on the same footing spin and electron correlation as well as the multiconfiguration character of the wave function. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics