Role of the Fermi Surface in Adsorbate−Metal Interactions: An Energy Decomposition Analysis

Energy Decomposition Analysis for Metal Surface-Adsorbate Interactions by Block Localized Wave Functions

The energy decomposition analysis based on block localized wave functions (BLW-EDA) allows one to gain physical insight into the nature of chemical bonding, decomposing the interaction energy in (1) a "frozen" term, accounting for the attraction due to electrostatic and dispersion interactions, modulated by Pauli repulsion, (2) the variationally assessed polarization energy, and (3) the charge transfer. This method has so far been applied to gas- and condensed-phase molecular systems. However, its standard version is not compatible with fractionally occupied orbitals (i.e., electronic smearing) and, as a consequence, cannot be applied to metallic surfaces. In this work, we propose a simple and practical extension of BLW-EDA to fractionally occupied orbitals, termed Ensemble BLW-EDA. As illustrative examples, we have applied the developed method to analyze the nature of the interaction of various adsorbates on Pt(111), ranging from physisorbed water to strongly chemisorbed ethylene. Our results show that polarization and charge transfer both contribute significantly at the adsorption minimum for all studied systems. The energy decomposition analysis provides details with respect to competing adsorption sites (e.g., CO on atop vs hollow sites) and elucidates the respective importance of polarization and charge transfer for the increased adsorption energy of H₂S compared to H₂O. Our development will enable a deeper understanding of the impact of charge transfer on catalytic processes in general.

Energy Decomposition Analysis Based on Absolutely Localized Molecular Orbitals for Large-Scale Density Functional Theory Calculations in Drug Design

We report the development and implementation of an energy decomposition analysis (EDA) scheme in the ONETEP linear-scaling electronic structure package. Our approach is hybrid as it combines the localized molecular orbital EDA (Su, P.; Li, H. J. Chem. Phys., 2009, 131, 014102) and the absolutely localized molecular orbital EDA (Khaliullin, R. Z.; et al. J. Phys. Chem. A, 2007, 111, 8753-8765) to partition the intermolecular interaction energy into chemically distinct components (electrostatic, exchange, correlation, Pauli repulsion, polarization, and charge transfer). Limitations shared in EDA approaches such as the issue of basis set dependence in polarization and charge transfer are discussed, and a remedy to this problem is proposed that exploits the strictly localized property of the ONETEP orbitals. Our method is validated on a range of complexes with interactions relevant to drug design. We demonstrate the capabilities for large-scale calculations with our approach on complexes of thrombin with an inhibitor comprised of up to 4975 atoms. Given the capability of ONETEP for large-scale calculations, such as on entire proteins, we expect that our EDA scheme can be applied in a large range of biomolecular problems, especially in the context of drug design.