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Geometrical and optical benchmarking of copper guanidine–quinoline complexes: Insights from TD‐DFT and many‐body perturbation theory †
Author(s) -
Jesser Anton,
Rohrmüller Martin,
Schmidt Wolf Gero,
HerresPawlis Sonja
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of computational chemistry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.907
H-Index - 188
eISSN - 1096-987X
pISSN - 0192-8651
DOI - 10.1002/jcc.23449
Subject(s) - chemistry , tautomer , basis set , excitation , computational chemistry , copper , perturbation theory (quantum mechanics) , configuration interaction , atomic orbital , molecular physics , atomic physics , density functional theory , molecule , physics , quantum mechanics , stereochemistry , organic chemistry , electron
We report a comprehensive computational benchmarking of the structural and optical properties of a bis(chelate) copper(I) guanidine–quinoline complex. Using various (TD‐)DFT flavors a strong influence of the basis set is found. Moreover, the amount of exact exchange shifts metal‐to‐ligand bands by 1 eV through the absorption spectrum. The BP86/6‐311G(d) and B3LYP/def2‐TZVP functional/basis set combinations were found to yield results in best agreement with the experimental data. In order to probe the general applicability of TD‐DFT to excitations of copper bis(chelate) charge‐transfer (CT) systems, we studied a small model system that on the one hand is accessible to methods of many‐body perturbation theory (MBPT) but still contains simple guanidine and imine groups. These calculations show that large quasiparticle energies of the order of several electronvolts are largely offset by exciton binding energies for optical excitations and that TD‐DFT excitation energies deviate from MBPT results by at most 0.5 eV, further corroborating the reliability of our TD‐DFT results. The latter result in a multitude of MLCT bands ranging from the visible region at 3.4 eV into the UV at 5.5 eV for the bis(chelate) complex. Molecular orbital analysis provided insight into the CT within these systems but gave mixed transitions. A meaningful transition assignment is possible, however, by using natural transition orbitals. Additionally, we performed a thorough conformational analysis as the correct description of the copper coordination is crucial for the prediction of optical spectra. We found that DFT identifies the correct conformational minimum and that the MLCTs are strongly dependent on the torsion of the chelate angles at the copper center. From the results, it is concluded that extensive benchmarking allows for the quantitative analyses of the CT behavior of copper bis(chelate) complexes within TD‐DFT. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.