1. Performance of DFT Sergio Aragon San Francisco State University CalTech PASI January 4-16, 2004

2. H2 Dissociation Curve

3. Performance: Ozone

4. Bond lengths & Bond Angles
Koch &
Holthausen

5. Octahedral Cr Complex

6. Octahedral Metallic Carbonyls

7. Vibrational Frequencies

8. Thermochemistry

9. Ionization Energies
HF under-estimates ionization energies: more correlation in the neutral than in the ion.

10. Electron Affinities
Affinities are very problematic for HF//anything methods. Extra electron adds correlation and is very diffuse.
DFT does reasonably well.

11. Excitation Energies: Ethylene
Poor asymptotic behavior of ordinary functionals yields a deteriorating picture as the excitation energy increases.
Asymptotically corrected functionals such as PBE perform as well as the very expensive CAS methods.

12. Dipole Moments HF predicts the wrong sign of the dipole moment for CO!
DFT performs very well.

13. Polarizabilities
Polarizabilities are inversely proportional to orbital energy differences. DFT, with poor asymptotics, has high values of the HOMO energy and overestimates the polarizability.

14. Hydrogen bonding: Water Dimer
The fabulous numbers for the BLYP functional have been shown to be due to fortuitous error cancellation. Hybrid functionals do not overperform the HF//MP2 level.

15. Further Study
Koch, W. and Holthausen, M.C., “A Chemist’s Guide to Density Functional Theory”, Wiley-VCH: New York, 2000.
Further comparisons are available on:
IR intensities
NMR chemical shifts and spin-spin couplings
Hyperpolarizabilities
ESR tensors & Hyperfine couplings
Weakly bound systems & clusters.

17. Atoms in Molecules