Noncovalent Interactions in the Catechol Dimer

Noncovalent interactions play a significant role in a wide variety of biological processes and bio-inspired species. It is, therefore, important to have at hand suitable computational methods for their investigation. In this paper, we report on the contribution of dispersion and hydrogen bonds in both stacked and T-shaped catechol dimers, with the aim of delineating the respective role of these classes of interactions in determining the most stable structure. By using second-order Møller⁻Plesset (MP2) calculations with a small basis set, specifically optimized for these species, we have explored a number of significant sections of the interaction potential energy surface and found the most stable structures for the dimer, in good agreement with the highly accurate, but computationally more expensive coupled cluster single and double excitation and the perturbative triples (CCSD(T))/CBS) method.