Zn coordination chemistry: Development of benchmark suites for geometries, dipole moments, and bond dissociation energies and their use to test and validate density functionals and molecular orbital theory

We present nonrelativistic and relativistic benchmark databases (obtained by coupled cluster calculations) of 10 Zn-ligand bond distances, 8 dipole moments, and 12 bond dissociation energies in Zn coordination compounds with O, S, NH₃, H₂O, OH, SCH₃, and H ligands. These are used to test the predictions of 39 density functionate, Hartree-Fock theory, and seven more approximate molecular orbital theories. In the nonrelativisitic case, the M05-2X, B97-2, and mPW1PW functionate emerge as the most accurate ones for this test data, with unitless balanced mean unsigned errors (BMUEs) of 0.33, 0.38, and 0.43, respectively. The best local functionals (i.e., functionals with no Hartree-Fock exchange) are M06-L and τ-HCTH with BMUEs of 0.54 and 0.60, respectively. The popular B3LYP functional has a BMUE of 0.51, only slightly better than the value of 0.54 for the best local functional, which is less expensive. Hartree-Fock theory itself has a BMUE of 1.22. The M05-2X functional has a mean unsigned error of 0.008 Å for bond lengths, 0.19 D for dipole moments, and 4.30 kcal/mol for bond energies. The X3LYP functional has a smaller mean unsigned error (0.007 Å) for bond lengths but has mean unsigned errors of 0.43 D for dipole moments and 5.6 kcal/mol for bond energies. The M06-2X functional has a smaller mean unsigned error (3.3 kcal/mol) for bond energies but has mean unsigned errors of 0.017 Å for bond lengths and 0.37 D for dipole moments. The best of the semiempirical molecular orbital theories are PM3 and PM6, with BMUEs of 1.96 and 2.02, respectively. The ten most accurate functionate from the nonrelativistic benchmark analysis are then tested in relativistic calculations against new benchmarks obtained with coupled-cluster calculations and a relativistic effective core potential, resulting in M05-2X (BMUE = 0.895), PW6B95 (BMUE = 0.90), and B97-2 (BMUE = 0.93) as the top three functionate. We find significant relativistic effects (∼0.01 Å in bond lengths, ∼0.2 D in dipole moments, and ∼4 kcal/mol in Zn-ligand bond energies) that cannot be neglected for accurate modeling, but the same density functionate that do well in all-electron nonrelativistic calculations do well with relativistic effective core potentials. Although most tests are carried out with augmented polarized triple-ζ basis sets, we also carried out some tests with an augmented polarized double-ζ basis set, and we found, on average, that with the smaller basis set DFT has no loss in accuracy for dipole moments and only ∼10% less accurate bond lengths.