High Level Electronic Structure Calculation of Molecular Solid-State NMR Shielding Constants

Abstract

In this work, we present a quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) approach for the computation of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (SS-NMR) shielding constants (SCs) for molecular crystals. Besides applying standard-DFT functionals like GGAs (PBE), meta-GGAs (TPSS), and hybrids (B3LYP), we apply a double-hybrid (DSD-PBEP86) functional as well as MP2, using the domain-based local pair natural orbital (DLPNO) formalism, to calculate the NMR SCs of six amino acid crystals. All the electronic structure methods used exhibit good correlation of the NMR shieldings with respect to experimental chemical shifts for both 1H and 13C. We also find that local electronic structure is much more important than the long-range electrostatic effects for these systems, implying that cluster approaches using all-electron/Gaussian basis set methods might offer great potential for predictive computations of solid-state NMR parameters for organic solids.