Benchmark Energetic Data in a Model System for Grubbs II Metathesis Catalysis and Their Use for the Development, Assessment, and Validation of Electronic Structure Methods

We present benchmark relative energetics in the catalytic cycle of a model system for Grubbs second-generation olefin metathesis catalysts. The benchmark data were determined by a composite approach based on CCSD(T) calculations, and they were used as a training set to develop a new spin-component-scaled MP2 method optimized for catalysis, which is called SCSC-MP2. The SCSC-MP2 method has improved performance for modeling Grubbs II olefin metathesis catalysts as compared to canonical MP2 or SCS-MP2. We also employed the benchmark data to test 17 WFT methods and 39 density functionals. Among the tested density functionals, M06 is the best performing functional. M06/TZQS gives an MUE of only 1.06 kcal/mol, and it is a much more affordable method than the SCSC-MP2 method or any other correlated WFT methods. The best performing meta-GGA is M06-L, and M06-L/DZQ gives an MUE of 1.77 kcal/mol. PBEh is the best performing hybrid GGA, with an MUE of 3.01 kcal/mol; however, it does not perform well for the larger, real Grubbs II catalyst. B3LYP and many other functionals containing the LYP correlation functional perform poorly, and B3LYP underestimates the stability of stationary points for the cis-pathway of the model system by a large margin. From the assessments, we recommend the M06, M06-L, and MPW1B95 functionals for modeling Grubbs II olefin metathesis catalysts. The local M06-L method is especially efficient for calculations on large systems.