Performance of Property-Optimized Basis Sets for Optical Rotation with Coupled Cluster Theory

The effectiveness of the optical rotation prediction (ORP) basis set for computing specific rotations at the coupled cluster (CC) level has been evaluated for a test set of 14 chiral compounds. For this purpose, the ORP basis set has been developed for the second-row atoms present in the investigated systems (that is, for sulfur, phosphorus, and chlorine). The quality of the resulting set was preliminarily evaluated for seven molecules using time-dependent density-functional theory (TD-DFT). Rotations were calculated with the coupled cluster singles and doubles method (CCSD) as well as the second-order approximate coupled cluster singles and doubles method (CC2) with the correlation-consistent aug-cc-pVDZ and aug-cc-pVTZ basis sets and extrapolated to estimate the complete basis-set (CBS) limit for comparison with the ORP basis set. In the compounds examined here, the ORP calculations on molecules containing only first-row atoms compare favorably with results from the larger aug-cc-pVTZ basis set, in some cases lying closer to the estimated CBS limit, while results for molecules containing second-row atoms indicate that larger correlation-consistent basis sets are necessary to obtain reliable estimates of the CBS limit.