Predicting critical temperatures of iron(II) spin crossover materials: density functional theory plus U approach

A first-principles study of critical temperatures (T(c)) of spin crossover (SCO) materials requires accurate description of the strongly correlated 3d electrons as well as much computational effort. This task is still a challenge for the widely used local density or generalized gradient approximations (LDA/GGA) and hybrid functionals. One remedy, termed density functional theory plus U (DFT+U) approach, introduces a Hubbard U term to deal with the localized electrons at marginal computational cost, while treats the delocalized electrons with LDA/GGA. Here, we employ the DFT+U approach to investigate the T(c) of a pair of iron(II) SCO molecular crystals (α and β phase), where identical constituent molecules are packed in different ways. We first calculate the adiabatic high spin-low spin energy splitting ΔE(HL) and molecular vibrational frequencies in both spin states, then obtain the temperature dependent enthalpy and entropy changes (ΔH and ΔS), and finally extract T(c) by exploiting the ΔH/T - T and ΔS - T relationships. The results are in agreement with experiment. Analysis of geometries and electronic structures shows that the local ligand field in the α phase is slightly weakened by the H-bondings involving the ligand atoms and the specific crystal packing style. We find that this effect is largely responsible for the difference in T(c) of the two phases. This study shows the applicability of the DFT+U approach for predicting T(c) of SCO materials, and provides a clear insight into the subtle influence of the crystal packing effects on SCO behavior.