Understanding the chemical bonding of ground and excited states of HfO and HfB with correlated wavefunction theory and density functional approximations
Name
5.0090128.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
5.75 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5567d41eb839d9fe011037918ee06963
Author(s)
Ariyarathna, Isuru R
Duan, Chenru
Kulik, Heather J
Date Issued
2022
Journal
The Journal of Chemical Physics
Publisher
AIP Publishing
Citation
Ariyarathna, Isuru R, Duan, Chenru and Kulik, Heather J. 2022. "Understanding the chemical bonding of ground and excited states of HfO and HfB with correlated wavefunction theory and density functional approximations." The Journal of Chemical Physics, 156 (18).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Knowledge of the chemical bonding of HfO and HfB ground and low-lying electronic states provides essential insights into a range of catalysts and materials that contain Hf–O or Hf–B moieties. Here, we carry out high-level multi-reference configuration interaction theory and coupled cluster quantum chemical calculations on these systems. We compute full potential energy curves, excitation energies, ionization energies, electronic configurations, and spectroscopic parameters with large quadruple- ζ and quintuple- ζ quality correlation consistent basis sets. We also investigate equilibrium chemical bonding patterns and effects of correlating core electrons on property predictions. Differences in the ground state electron configuration of HfB(X4[Formula: see text]−) and HfO(X1[Formula: see text]+) lead to a significantly stronger bond in HfO than HfB, as judged by both dissociation energies and equilibrium bond distances. We extend our analysis to the chemical bonding patterns of the isovalent HfX (X = O, S, Se, Te, and Po) series and observe similar trends. We also note a linear trend between the decreasing value of the dissociation energy (De) from HfO to HfPo and the singlet–triplet energy gap ([Formula: see text]ES–T) of the molecule. Finally, we compare these benchmark results to those obtained using density functional theory (DFT) with 23 exchange–correlation functionals spanning multiple rungs of “Jacob’s ladder.” When comparing DFT errors to coupled cluster reference values on dissociation energies, excitation energies, and ionization energies of HfB and HfO, we observe semi-local generalized gradient approximations to significantly outperform more complex and high-cost functionals.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0090128
