Density functional studies of representative pericyclic reactions

Abstract

Density functional theory (DFT) has traditionally been shunned by computational chemists, but has long seen widespread use in the physics community. Recently, however, DFT has been adopted by the ab initio quantum chemistry community and much activity has been devoted to refining the methodology and exploring the range of its applicability. We investigate the use of DFT (both local (LDF) and non-local (NLDF) spin density approximations) to calculate transition and equilibrium structures for three representative pericyclic reactions: the electrocyclic ring opening reaction of cyclobutene, the [1,5] sigmatropic hydrogen shift reaction in (Z)-1,3-pentadiene, and the Diels—Alder cycloaddition reaction between ethylene and butadiene. LDF theory tends to overemphasize the stability of the ringed structures in each of these reactions. For example, LDF predicts a very low (6kcalmol −1) barrier to reaction for the Deils—Alder reaction. NLDF theory substantially improves the calculated reaction barrier (20kcalmor −1), but it is still low with respect to experiment.