We present the Voronoi Deformation Density (VDD) method for computing atomic charges. The VDD method does not explicitly use the basis functions but calculates the amount of electronic density that flows to or from a certain atom due to bond formation by spatial integration of the deformation density over the atomic Voronoi cell. We compare our method to the well-known Mulliken, Hirshfeld, Bader, and Weinhold [Natural Population Analysis (NPA)] charges for a variety of biological, organic, and inorganic molecules. The Mulliken charges are (again) shown to be useless due to heavy basis set dependency, and the Bader charges (and often also the NPA charges) are not realistic, yielding too extreme values that suggest much ionic character even in the case of covalent bonds. The Hirshfeld and VDD charges, which prove to be numerically very similar, are to be recommended because they yield chemically meaningful charges. We stress the need to use spatial integration over an atomic domain to get rid of basis set dependency, and the need to integrate the deformation density in order to obtain a realistic picture of the charge rearrangement upon bonding. An asset of the VDD charges is the transparency of the approach owing to the simple geometric partitioning of space. The deformation density based charges prove to conform to chemical experience.
We report the first computational study of a fully atomistic model of the ruthenium-catalyzed transfer hydrogenation of formaldehyde and the reverse reaction in an explicit methanol solution. Using ab initio molecular dynamics techniques, we determined the thermodynamics, mechanism, and electronic structure along the reaction path. To assess the effect of the solvent quantitatively, we make a direct comparison with the gas-phase reaction. We find that the energy profile in solution bears little resemblance to the profile in the gas phase and a distinct solvation barrier is found: the activation barriers in both directions are lowered and the concerted hydride and proton transfer in the gas phase are converted into a sequential mechanism in solution with the substrate appearing as methoxide-like intermediate. Our results indicate that besides the metal-ligand bifunctional mechanism, as proposed by Noyori, also a concerted solvent-mediated mechanism is feasible. Our study gives a new perspective of the active role a solvent can have in transition-metal-catalyzed reactions.
We present a density-functional theory based molecular dynamics study of the structural, dynamical, and electronic properties of liquid methanol under ambient conditions. The calculated radial distribution functions involving the oxygen and hydroxyl hydrogen show a pronounced hydrogen bonding and compare well with recent neutron diffraction data. We observe that, in line with infrared spectroscopic data, the hydroxyl-stretching mode is significantly redshifted in the liquid, whereas the hydroxyl bending mode shows a blueshift. A substantial enhancement of the molecular dipole moment is accompanied by significant fluctuations due to thermal motion. We compute a value of 32 for the relative permittivity, almost identical to the experimental value of 33. Our results provide valuable data for improvement of empirical potentials.
We present a density functional theory based computational study comparing simplified models for the ruthenium(II)-and iridium(I)-catalyzed transfer hydrogenation of ketones. For the ruthenium compound our results confirm earlier findings that the hydrogenation involves a ruthenium hydride and occurs via a concerted hydrogen transfer mechanism with no direct ruthenium-ketone binding along the reaction path. In contrast, for the iridium compound our calculations suggest that the reaction proceeds via direct hydrogen transfer between simultaneously coordinated ketone and alcohol. We find that for both metal complexes the formation of a very stable metal-alkoxide complex plays an important role. For the ruthenium-catalyzed reaction it constitutes a resting state that does not take an active part in the transfer hydrogenation, while for the iridium-catalyzed reaction it is an important intermediate along the reaction path.
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