Density-Functional and Coupled-Cluster Singles-and-Doubles Calculations of the Nuclear Shielding and Indirect Nuclear Spin-Spin Coupling Constants of o-Benzyne.

Abstract

Density-functional theory (DFT) and coupled-cluster singles-and-doubles (CCSD) theory are applied to compute the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) shielding and indirect nuclear spin-spin coupling constants of o-benzyne, whose biradical nature makes it difficult to study both experimentally and theoretically. Because of near-equilibrium triplet instabilities that follow from its biradical character, the calculated DFT NMR properties of o-benzyne are unusually sensitive to details of the exchange-correlation functional. However, this sensitivity is greatly reduced if these properties are calculated at the equilibrium of the chosen functional. A strong correlation is demonstrated between the quality of the calculated indirect spin-spin coupling constants and the quality of the calculated lowest triplet excitation energy in o-benzyne. Orbital-unrelaxed coupled-cluster theory should be less affected by such instabilities, and the CCSD NMR properties were only calculated at the experimental equilibrium geometry. For the shielding constants, the results in best agreement with experimental results are obtained with CCSD theory and with the Keal-Tozer KT1 and KT2 functionals. For the triply bonded carbon atoms, these models yield an isotropic shielding of 1.3, -3.3, and -1.2 ppm, respectively, compared with the experimentally observed shielding of 3.7 ppm for incarcerated o-benzyne. For the indirect spin-spin coupling constants, the CCSD model and the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof functional both yield reliable results; for the most interesting spin-spin coupling constant, (1)J (C⋮C), we obtain 210 and 209 Hz with these two models, respectively, somewhat above the recently reported experimental value of 177.9 ± 0.7 Hz for o-benzyne inside a molecular container, suggesting large incarceration effects.