The ground state and electronic structure of Gd@C82: a systematic theoretical investigation of first principle...

As a representative lanthanide endohedral metallofullerene, Gd@C82 has attracted a widespread attention among theorists and experimentalists ever since its first synthesis. Through comprehensive comparisons and discussions, as well as references to the latest high precision experiments, we evaluated the performance of different computational methods. Our results showed that the appropriate choice of the exchange-correlation functionals is the decisive factor to accurately predict both geometric and electronic structures for Gd@C82. The electronic structure of the ground state and energy gap between the septet ground state and the nonet low-lying state obtained from pure density functional methods, such as PBE and PW91, are in good agreement with current experiment. Unlike pure functionals, the popularly used hybrid functionals in previous studies, such as B3LYP, could infer the qualitative correct ground state only when small basis set for C atoms is employed. Furthermore, we also highlighted that other geometric structures of Gd@C82 with the Gd staying at different positions are either not stable or with higher energies. This work should provide some useful references for various theoretical methodologies in further density functional studies on Gd@C82 and its derivatives in the future.