PNNL

Abstract

The research described in this product was performed in part in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The ground and lower excited states of Fe2, Fe2 -, and FeO+ were studied using a number of density functional theory (DFT) methods. Specific attention was paid to the relative state energies, the internuclear distances (re), and the harmonic vibrational frequencies (öe). A number of factors influencing the calculated values of these properties were examined. These include basis sets, the nature of the density functional chosen, the percentage of Hartree- Fock exchange in the density functional, and constraints on orbital symmetry. A number of different types of generalized gradient approximation (GGA) density functionals (straight GGA, hybrid GGA, meta-GGA, and hybrid meta-GGA) were examined, and it was found that the best results were obtained with hybrid GGA or hybrid meta-GGA functionals that contain nonzero fractions of HF exchange; specifically, the best overall results were obtained with B3LYP, M05, and M06, closely followed by B1LYP. One significant observation was the effect of enforcing symmetry on the orbitals. When a degenerate orbital (ð or ä) is partially occupied in the 4¼ excited state of FeO+, reducing the enforced symmetry (from C6v to C4v to C2v) results in a lower energy since these degenerate orbitals are split in the lower symmetries. The results obtained were compared to higher level ab initio results from the literature and to recent PBE+U plane wave results by Kulik et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2006, 97, 103001). It was found that some of the improvements that were afforded by the semiempirical +U correction can also be accomplished by improving the form of the DFT functional and, in one case, by not enforcing high symmetry on the orbitals.