Spin-State Splittings in 3d Transition-Metal Complexes Revisited: Benchmarking Approximate Methods for Adiabatic Spin-State Energy Differences in Fe(II) Complexes

The CASPT2+δMRCI composite approach reported in a companion paper has been extended and used to provide high-quality reference data for a series of adiabatic spin gaps (defined as ΔE = E quintet – E singlet) of [FeIIL6]2+ complexes (L = CNH, CO, NCH, NH3, H2O), either at nonrelativistic level or including scalar relativistic effects. These highly accurate data have been used to evaluate the performance of various more approximate methods. Coupled-cluster theory with singles, doubles, and perturbative triples, CCSD­(T), is found to agree well with the new reference data for Werner-type complexes but exhibits larger underestimates by up to 70 kJ/mol for the π-acceptor ligands, due to appreciable static correlation in the low-spin states of these systems. Widely used domain-based local CCSD­(T) calculations, DLPNO-CCSD­(T), are shown to depend very sensitively on the cutoff values used to construct the localized domains, and standard values are not sufficient. A large number of density functional approximations have been evaluated against the new reference data. The B2PLYP double hybrid gives the smallest deviations, but several functionals from different rungs of the usual ladder hierarchy give mean absolute deviations below 20 kJ/mol. This includes the B97-D semilocal functional, the PBE0* global hybrid with 15% exact-exchange admixture, as well as the local hybrids LH07s-SVWN and LH07t-SVWN. Several further functionals achieve mean absolute errors below 30 kJ/mol (M06L-D4, SSB-D, B97-1-D4, LC-ωPBE-D4, LH12ct-SsirPW92-D4, LH12ct-SsifPW92-D4, LH14t-calPBE-D4, LHJ-HFcal-D4, and several further double hybrids) and thereby also still overall outperform CCSD­(T) or uncorrected CASPT2. While exact-exchange admixture is a crucial factor in favoring high-spin states, the present evaluations confirm that other aspects can be important as well. A number of the better-performing functionals underestimate the spin gaps for the π-acceptor ligands but overestimate them for L = NH3, H2O. In contrast to a previous suggestion, non-self-consistent density functional theory (DFT) computations on top of Hartree–Fock orbitals are not a promising path to produce accurate spin gaps in such complexes.