Coupling Constants, High Spin, and Broken Symmetry States of Organic Radicals: an Assessment of the...

We extend the application of our multilayer molecules-in-molecules (MIM) fragmentation-based method to the study of open-shell systems, particularly organic radicals. A test set of organic mono-, di- and polyradicals with a wide range in size, containing up to 360 atoms, was investigated. Total energies computed with MIM using density functional theory (DFT) were compared with full, unfragmented energies to assess the performance of MIM and to develop a systematic protocol for the treatment of large radical systems. More specifically, a two-layer (MIM2) model with a fragmentation scheme along the backbone involving covalently bonded dimers, trimers, or tetramers was considered, with DFT at a smaller basis set serving as the low level of theory. The MIM method was evaluated on the high-spin state and several possible broken-symmetry (BS) states for di- and polyradicals. When relevant spin-spin interactions were considered, the errors in total energies were less than 1 kcal mol^-1. In addition, the applicability of MIM2 was extended to predict the intersite magnetic exchange coupling constants (J), which were compared with reference values. Further, since the energy levels derived from Hamiltonian diagonalization are physically more meaningful, the calculated J values estimated from the BS-DFT methodology were used to obtain the lower spin state energies of the polyradicals. The difference in calculated total energies of the lower spin state between full and MIM2 lie within 1 kcal mol^-1 in the majority of these cases. Our rigorous, quantum chemical study demonstrates that MIM can be successfully applied to the study of large organic radicals reliably and accurately within the framework of BS-DFT.