Intermolecular Interaction in Methylene Halide (CH₂F₂, CH₂Cl₂, CH₂Br₂ and CH₂I₂) Dimers

The intermolecular interaction in difluoromethane, dichloromethane, dibromomethane, and diiodomethane dimers has been investigated using high level quantum chemical methods. The potential energy curve of intermolecular interaction along the C⋯C bond distance obtained using the coupled-cluster theory with singles, doubles, and perturbative triples excitations CCSD(T) were compared with values given by the same method, but applying the local (LCCSD(T)) and the explicitly correlated (CCSD(T)-F12) approximations. The accuracy of other theoretical methods-Hartree-Fock (HF), second order Møller-Plesset perturbation (MP2), and dispersion corrected DFT theory-were also presented. In the case of MP2 level, the canonical and the local-correlation cases combined with the density-fitting technique (DF-LMP2)theories were considered, while for the dispersion-corrected DFT, the empirically-corrected BLYP-D and the M06-2Xexchange-correlation functionals were applied. In all cases, the aug-cc-pVTZ basis set was used, and the results were corrected for the basis set superposition error (BSSE) using the counterpoise method. For each molecular system, several dimer geometries were found, and their mutual orientations were compared with the nearest neighbor orientations obtained in recent neutron scattering studies. The nature of the intermolecular interaction energy was discussed.