The appearance of an interval of energies that contain the whole diamagnetic contribution to NMR magnetic shieldings

Performance of the LRESC Model on top of DFT Functionals for Relativistic NMR Shielding Calculations

The linear response within the elimination of the small component model (LRESC) is an insightful and computationally efficient method for including relativistic effects on molecular properties like the nuclear magnetic shielding constants, spin-rotation constant, g-tensor, and electric field gradient of heavy atom containing molecules with atoms belonging up to the sixth row of the periodic table. One of its main advantages is its capacity to analyze the electronic origin of the different relativistic correcting terms. Until now, it was always applied on top of Hartree-Fock ground-state wave functions (LRESC/HF) to calculate and analyze NMR shieldings. In this work, we show the performance of the LRESC formalism on top of some density functional theory (DFT) functionals to compute tin shielding constants in SnX₄ (X = H, F, Cl, Br, I) molecular systems. We analyze the performance of each LRESC/DFT scheme on reproducing the electronic mechanisms of the shieldings, taking as a benchmark the results of relativistic calculations at the RPA level of approach (4c/RPA). As in previous works, we divide the LRESC relativistic correcting terms into two groups: core-dependent and ligand-dependent contributions. It is shown here that core-dependent corrections are well-reproduced for the selected DFT functionals, but some differences arise in the ligand-dependent ones. We focus on the performance of different functionals, including the same electron correlation part but containing different amounts of HF exchange. The best results are obtained for the BHandHLYP functional (50% of HF exchange) and the worst for BLYP (0%). When the percentage of HF exchange increases, ligand-dependent contributions are better described, and the final LRESC/DFT results are closer to those obtained with LRESC/HF and 4c/RPA methods. The spin-orbit correction to the shielding constant is one of the main ligand-dependent contributions (there are two more) with total value depending on the amount of HF exchange included in the functional. When the amount of HF exchange decreases, the spin-orbit contribution becomes larger, overestimating the shielding constant even when nonrelativisitc DFT values are much smaller than the nonrelativistic HF ones, as it happens for the heaviest molecular system studied here (SnI₄).

Relativistic and electron-correlation effects on the nuclear magnetic resonance shieldings of molecules containing tin and lead atoms

The reference values for NMR magnetic shieldings, σ(ref), are of the highest importance when theoretical analysis of chemical shifts are envisaged. The fact that the nonrelativistically valid relationship among spin-rotation constants and magnetic shieldings is not any longer valid for heavy atoms requires that the search for σ(ref) for such atoms needs new strategies to follow. We present here results of σ(ref) that were obtained by applying our own simple procedure which mixes accurate experimental chemical shifts (δ) and theoretical magnetic shieldings (σ). We calculated σ(Sn) and σ(Pb) in a family of heavy-halogen-containing molecules. We found out that σ(ref)[Sn;Sn(CH3)4] in gas phase should be close to 3864.11 ± 20.05 ppm (0.5%). For Pb atom, σ(ref)[Pb;Pb(CH3)4] should be close to 14475.1 ± 500.7 ppm. Such theoretical values correspond to calculations with the relativistic polarization propagator method, RelPPA, at the RPA level of approach. They are closer to experimental values as compared to those obtained applying few different functionals such as PBE0, B3LYP, BLYP, BP86, KT2, and KT3 of the density functional theory, DFT. We studied tin and lead shieldings of the XY(4-n)Z(n) (X = Sn, Pb; Y, Z = H, F, Cl, Br, I) and PbH(4-n)I(n) (n = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4) family of compounds with four-component functionals as implemented in the DIRAC code. For these systems results of calculations with RelPPA-RPA are more reliable than DFT ones. We argue about why those DFT functionals must be modified in order to obtain more accurate results of NMR magnetic shieldings within the relativistic regime: first, there is a dependence among both electron-correlation and relativistic effects that should be introduced in some way in the functionals; and second, the DIRAC code uses standard nonrelativistic functionals and the functionals B3LYP and PBE0 were parametrized only with data taken from light elements. It can explain why they are not able to properly introduce relativistic effects on nuclear magnetic shieldings. We finally show that in the analysis of magnetic shieldings for the family of compounds mentioned above, one must consider the newest and so-called heavy-atom effect on vicinal heavy atoms, HAVHA. Such effects are among the most important relativistic effects in these kind of compounds.