2,6-Dimethylnaphthalene (DMN) is the key intermediate in the synthesis of poly(ethylene naphthalate) (PEN), a high-performance polymer. The detailed reaction mechanism of the catalyzed 1,5to 2,6DMN isomerization via 1,6-DMN by acidic beta zeolite is investigated at the ONIOM(M06-L/6-31G(d,p):UFF) level of theory. The M06-L method, a newly developed density functional theory, is applied for the ...

The performance of 24 density functionals, including 14 meta-generalized gradient approximation (mGGA) functionals, is assessed for the calculation of vertical excitation energies against an experimental benchmark set comprising 14 small- to medium-sized compounds with 101 total excited states. The experimental benchmark set consists of singlet, triplet, valence, and Rydberg excited states. The...

The SM8 quantum mechanical aqueous continuum solvation model is applied to a 17-molecule test set proposed by Nicholls et al. (J. Med. Chem. 2008, 51, 769) to predict free energies of solvation. With the M06-2X density functional, the 6-31G(d) basis set, and CM4M charge model, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of SM8 is 1.08 kcal mol(-1) for aqueous geometries and 1.14 kcal mol(-1) for gas-phas...

DFT and MP2 calculations are performed to obtain optimized ground state geometries and binding energies of the cage and the prism conformers of water W6 clusters and Bz-W6 clusters using the aug-cc-pVDZ basis set. The cage conformer of Bz-W6 system is found to be more stable than prism conformer for all range of DFT functionals and MP2. Time dependent-DFT is then used to study UV spectroscopy o...

The geometries and binding energies of a recent buckyball tweezers (C(60)H(28)) and its supramolecular complexes are investigated using recently developed density functionals (M06-L and M06-2X) that include an accurate treatment of medium-range correlation energy. The pincer part of the tweezers, corannulene, has a strong attractive interaction with C(60). However, due to the entropy penalty, t...

The size at which nonplanar isomers of neutral, pristine gold nanoclusters become energetically favored over planar ones is still debated amongst theoreticians and experimentalists. Spectroscopy confirms planarity is preferred at sizes up to Au7, however, starting with Au8, the uncertainty remains for larger nanoclusters. Au8 computational studies have had different outcomes: the planar D4h "cl...

Noncovalent interactions, of which London dispersion is an important special case, are essential to many fields of chemistry. However, treatment of London dispersion is inherently outside the reach of (semi)local approximations to the exchange-correlation functional as well as of conventional hybrid density functionals based on semilocal correlation. Here, we offer an approach that provides a t...

In this article, we theoretically analyze the Diels-Alder cycloaddition between cyclopentadiene and C60 for which experimental results on energy barriers and reaction energies are known. The comparison of the results obtained with the two-layered ONIOM approach using different partitions for the high- and low-level layers with those obtained employing the B3LYP/6-31G(d) method for the entire sy...

The highly unsaturated binuclear butadiene iron carbonyls (C(4)H(6))(2)Fe(2)(CO)(n) (n = 2, 1) have been examined using density functional theory. For (C(4)H(6))(2)Fe(2)(CO)(n) (n = 2, 1), both coaxial and perpendicular structures are found. The global minima of (C(4)H(6))(2)Fe(2)(CO)(n) (n = 2, 1) are the perpendicular structures 2Q-1 and 1Q-1, respectively, with 17- and 15-electron configurat...

As assemblies of graphene sheets, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes become components of new nanotechnologies, it is important to be able to predict the structures and properties of these systems. A problem has been that the level of quantum mechanics practical for such systems (density functional theory at the PBE level) cannot describe the London dispersion forces responsible for interaction o...