Dispersion-correcting potentials can significantly improve the bond dissociation enthalpies and noncovalent binding energies predicted by density-functional theory

Dispersion-correcting potentials (DCPs) are atom-centered Gaussian functions that are applied in a manner that is similar to effective core potentials. Previous work on DCPs has focussed on their use as a simple means of improving the ability of conventional density-functional theory methods to predict the binding energies of noncovalently bonded molecular dimers. We show in this work that DCPs developed for use with the LC-\u3c9PBE functional along with 6-31+G(2d,2p) basis sets are capable of simultaneously improving predicted noncovalent binding energies of van der Waals dimer complexes and covalent bond dissociation enthalpies in molecules. Specifically, the DCPs developed herein for the C, H, N, and O atoms provide binding energies for a set of 66 noncovalently bonded molecular dimers (the "S66" set) with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.21 kcal/mol, which represents an improvement of more than a factor of 10 over unadorned LC-\u3c9PBE/6-31+G(2d,2p) and almost a factor of two improvement over LC-\u3c9PBE/6-31+G(2d,2p) used in conjunction with the "D3" pairwise dispersion energy corrections. In addition, the DCPs reduce the MAE of calculated X-H and X-Y (X,Y = C, H, N, O) bond dissociation enthalpies for a set of 40 species from 3.2 kcal/mol obtained with unadorned LC-\u3c9PBE/6-31+G(2d,2p) to 1.6 kcal/mol. Our findings demonstrate that broad improvements to the performance of DFT methods may be achievable through the use of DCPs.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye