Updated Calibrated Model for the Prediction of Molecular Frontier Orbital Energies and Its Application to Boron Subphthalocyanines.

Abstract

A diverse range of computational methods have been used to calibrate against available data and to compare against the correlation for the prediction of frontier orbital energies and optical gaps of novel boron subphthalocyanine (BsubPc) derivatives and related compounds. These properties are of fundamental importance to organic electronic material applications and development, making BsubPcs ideal candidates in pursuit of identifying promising materials for targeted applications. This work employs a database of highly accurate experimental data from materials produced and characterized in-house. The models presented herein calibrate these properties with R2 values > 0.95. We find that computationally inexpensive semiempirical methods such as PM6 and PM7 outperform most density functional theory methods for calibration. We are excited to share these results with the field as it empowers the community to determine key physical properties of BsubPcs with confidence using free software and a standard laptop prior to the arduous synthesis and purification thereof. This study is a follow up to our previous work calibrating PM3, RM1, and B3LYP-6-31G(d), which used a smaller set of BsubPc derivatives at a past point when less data were available.