Systematic Evaluation of Modern Density Functional Methods for the Computation of NMR Shifts of 3d Transition-Metal Nuclei.

A wide range of density functionals from all rungs of Jacob's ladder have been evaluated systematically for a set of experimental 3d transition-metal NMR shifts of 70 complexes encompassing 12 × Ti, 10 × V, 10 × Cr, 11 × Mn, 9 × Fe, 9 × Co, and 9 × Ni shift values, as well as a diverse range of electronic structure characteristics. The overall 39 functionals evaluated include one LDA, eight GGAs, seven meta-GGAs (including their current-density-functional─CDFT─versions), nine global hybrids, four range-separated hybrids, eight local hybrids, and two double hybrids, and we also include Hartree-Fock and MP2 calculations. While recent evaluations of the same functionals for a very large coupled-cluster-based benchmark of main-group shieldings and shifts achieved in some cases aggregate percentage mean absolute errors clearly below 2%, the best results for the present 3d-nuclei set are in the range between 4 and 5%. Strikingly, the overall best-performing functionals are the recently implemented CDFT versions of two meta-GGAs, namely cM06-L (4.0%) and cVSXC (4.3%), followed by cLH14t-calPBE (4.9%), B3LYP (5.0%), and cLH07t-SVWN (5.1%), i.e., the previously best-performing global hybrid and two local hybrids. A number of further functionals achieve aggregate deviations in the range 5-6%. Range-separated hybrids offer no particular advantage over global hybrids. Due to the overall poor performance of Hartree-Fock theory for all systems except the titanium complexes, MP2 and double-hybrid functionals are unsuitable for these 3d-nucleus shifts and provide large errors. Global hybrid functionals with larger EXX admixtures, such as BHLYP or M06-2X, also perform poorly, and some other highly parametrized global hybrids also are unsuitable. For many functionals depending on local kinetic energy τ, their CDFT variants perform much better than their "non-CDFT" versions. This holds notably also for the above-mentioned M06-L and VSXC, while the effect is small for τ-dependent local hybrids and can even be somewhat detrimental to the agreement with experiment for a few other cases. The separation between well-performing and more poorly performing functionals is mainly determined by their results for the most critical nuclei Mn, Fe, and Co. Here either moderate exact-exchange admixtures or CDFT versions of meta-GGAs are beneficial for the accuracy. The overall deviations of the better-performing global or local hybrids are then typically dominated by the Cr shifts, where triplet instabilities appear to disfavor exact-exchange admixture. Further detailed analyses help to pinpoint specific nuclei and specific types of complexes that are challenges for a given functional.