A semiempirical long-range corrected exchange correlation functional including a short-range Gaussian attenuation (LCgau-B97)

Abstract

We applied an improved long-range correction scheme including a short-range Gaussian attenuation (LCgau) to the Becke97 (B97) exchange correlation functional. In the optimization of LCgau-B97 functional, the linear parameters are determined by least squares fitting. Optimizing μ parameter (0.2) that controls long-range portion of Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange to excitation energies of large molecules (Chai and Head-Gordon, J Chem Phys 2008, 128, 084106) and additional short-range Gaussian parameters (a = 0.15 and k = 0.9) that controls HF exchange inclusion ranging from short-range to mid-range (0.5-3 Å) to ground state properties achieved high performances of LCgau-B97 simultaneously on both ground state and excited state properties, which is better than other tested semiempirical density functional theory (DFT) functionals, such as ωB97, ωB97X, BMK, and M0x-family. We also found that while a small μ value (∼0.2) in LC-DFT is appropriate to the local excitation and intramolecular charge-transfer excitation energies, a larger μ value (0.42) is desirable in the Rydberg excitation-energy calculations.