Mail:
Dept. of Chemistry
Ohio State University
100 W. 18th Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
Office:
412 CBEC
Email:
herbert@
chemistry.ohio-state.edu
Three new data sets for intermolecular interactions, AHB21 for anion–neutral dimers, CHB6 for cation–neutral dimers, and IL16 for ion pairs, are assembled here, with complete-basis CCSD(T) results for each. These benchmarks are then used to evaluate the accuracy of the single-exchange approximation that is used for exchange energies in symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT), and the accuracy of SAPT based on wave function and density-functional descriptions of the monomers is evaluated. High-level SAPT calculations afford poor results for these data sets, and this includes the recently-proposed "gold", "silver", and "bronze standards" of SAPT, namely, SAPT2+(3)-δMP2/aug-cc-pVTZ, SAPT2+/aug-cc-pVDZ, and sSAPT0/jun-cc-pVDZ, respectively [Parker et al., J. Chem. Phys. 2014, 140, 094106]. Especially poor results are obtained for symmetric shared-proton systems of the form X–...H+...X–, for X = F, Cl, OH. For the anionic data set, the SAPT2+(CCD)-δMP2/aug-cc-pVTZ method exhibits the best performance, with a MAE of 0.3 kcal/mol and a maximum error of 0.7 kcal/mol. For the cationic data set, the highest-level SAPT method, SAPT2+3-δMP2/aug-cc-pVQZ, outperforms the rest of the SAPT methods, with a MAE of 0.2 kcal/mol and a maximum error of 0.4 kcal/mol. For the ion-pair data set, the SAPT2+3-δMP2/aug-cc-pVTZ performs the best among all SAPT methods with a MAE of 0.3 kcal/mol and a maximum error of 0.9 kcal/mol. Overall, SAPT2+3-δMP2/aug-cc-pVTZ affords a small and balanced MAE (< 0.5 kcal/mol) for all three data sets, with an overall MAE of 0.4 kcal/mol. Despite the breakdown of perturbation theory for ionic systems at short range, SAPT can still be saved given two corrections: a "δHF" correction, which requires a supermolecular HF calculation to incorporate polarization effects beyond second order, and a "δMP2" correction, which requires a supermolecular MP2 calculation to account for higher-order induction-dispersion coupling. These corrections serve to remove artifacts introduced by the single exchange approximation in the exchange-induction and exchange-dispersion interactions, and obviate the need for ad hoc scaling of the first- and second-order exchange energies. Finally, some density-functional and MP2-based electronic structure methods are assessed as well, and we find that the best density-functional method for computing binding energies in these data sets is B97M-V/aug-cc-pVTZ, which affords a MAE of 0.4 kcal/mol, whereas complete-basis MP2 affords an MAE of 0.3 kcal/mol.