Extending, and repositioning, a thermochemical ladder: high-level quantum chemical calculations on the sodium cation...

High-level ab initio quantum chemical calculations, at the CP-dG2thaw level of theory, are reported for coordination of Na+ to a wide assortment of small organic and inorganic ligands. The ligands range in size from H to C6H6, and include 22 of the ligands for which precise relative sodium ion binding free energies have been determined by recent Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance and guided ion beam studies. Agreement with the relative experimental values is excellent (+/-1.1 kJ mol(-1)), and agreement with the absolute scale (obtained when these relative values are pegged to the CH3NH2 "anchor" value measured in a high-pressure mass spectrometric study) is only marginally poorer, with CP-dG2thaw values exceeding the absolute experimental DeltaG(298) values by an average of 2.1 kJ mol(-1). The excellent agreement between experiment and the CP-dG2thaw technique also suggests that the additional 97 ligands surveyed here (which, in many cases, are not readily susceptible to laboratory investigation) can also be reliably fitted to the existing experimental scale. However, while CP-dG2thaw and the experimental ladder are in close accord, a small set of higher level ab initio calculations on sodium ion/ligand complexes (including several values obtained here using the W1 protocol) suggests that the CP-dG2thaw values are themselves too low by approximately 2.5 kJ mol(-1), thereby implying that the accepted laboratory values are typically 4.6 kJ mol(-1) too low. The present work also highlights the importance of Na+/ligand binding energy determinations (whether by experimental or theoretical approaches) on a case-by-case basis: trends in increasing binding energy along homologous series of compounds are not reliably predictable, nor are binding site preferences or chelating tendencies in polyfunctional compounds.