Non‐empirical calculations of NMR indirect carbon–carbon coupling constants: 1. Three‐membered rings

The carbon–carbon indirect nuclear spin–spin coupling constants in cyclopropane, aziridine and oxirane were investigated by means of ab initio calculations at the RPA, SOPPA and DFT/B3LYP levels. We found that the carbon–carbon couplings are by far dominated by the Fermi contact term. Our best SOPPA and DFT results are in a very good agreement with each other and with the experimental values, whereas calculations at the RPA level of theory strongly overestimate the carbon–carbon couplings. Significant differences in the basis set dependence of the calculated carbon–carbon coupling constants obtained with either wavefunction method, RPA or SOPPA, or the density functional method, DFT/B3LYP, are observed. The SOPPA results depend much more strongly on the quality of the basis set than the results of DFT/B3LYP calculations. The medium‐sized core‐valence basis sets cc‐pCVTZ and even cc‐pCVDZ were found to perform fairly well at the SOPPA level for the one‐bond carbon–carbon couplings investigated here.