Bond Length Alternation of Conjugated Oligomers: Wave Function and DFT Benchmarks

We have computed the bond length alternation (BLA) in a series of π-conjugated quasilinear chains containing from two to six unit cells. Several structures (eight oligomeric sets including three conformers of polyacetylene, polymethineimine, polysilaacetylene, etc.) have been considered to cover the possible evolutions of the BLA with increasing chain length. Three objectives have been tackled: (1) the computation of accurate reference values using the CCSD(T) theory; (2) an evaluation of the performances of other electron correlated wave function approaches (MPn, SCS-MP2, CCSD, etc.); (3) the benchmarking of several DFT functionals, including global, range-separated, and double hybrids. It turns out that the SCS-MP2 approach is, on average, an efficient scheme in terms of its accuracy/cost ratio. Among the selected DFT approaches, no single functional emerges as uniformly accurate for all oligomeric series and chain lengths, but BHHLYP, M06-2X, and CAM-B3LYP could be reasonable choices for long oligomers.