Performance of dispersion-corrected double hybrid density functional theory: A computational study of OCS-hydrocarbon van der Waals complexes

The performance of double hybrid density functionals (DHDFs) has been assessed by studying the spectroscopic properties and potential energy curves of OCS-C2H4 (carbonyl sulfide-ethylene) and OCS-C4H6 (carbonyl sulfide-dimethylacetylene) van der Waals complexes. Both dispersion corrected and uncorrected DHDF theories have been applied to study the intermolecular interaction energies, stability, spectroscopic parameters, rigidity, and binding energies or depths of the potential well of the weakly bound complexes and also to explore the possibility of formation of three isomers of each complex. The correlation consistent valence triple zeta quality basis set is used to investigate the complexes. The calculated results provide insight into the computational methods applied to the weakly bound complexes. The double hybrid density functional B2PLYP and mPW2PLYP methods with dispersion corrections (B2PLYP-D2, B2PLYP-D3 and mPW2PLYP-D2, mPW2PLYP-D3) performed better over the B2PLYP and mPW2PLYP density functional methods without dispersion correction to deal with the weak dispersion interaction that prevails in these complexes. The results obtained by the dispersion-corrected density functional mPW2PLYP-D2 and mPW2PLYP-D3 methods agree very well with the earlier experimental values wherever available. The contributing components of the interaction energy have been analyzed by the symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT, here, SAPT0) to get insight into the interaction energy.