title: Assessment of DFT Functionals for QTAIM Topological Analysis of Halogen Bonds with Benzene.
abstract: Halogen bonding, a noncovalent interaction between a halogen atom and a nucleophilic site, is receiving a growing attention in the chemical community stimulating a large number of theoretical investigations. The density functional theory (DFT) approach revealed to be one of the most suitable methods owing to its accuracy and low computational cost. We report here a detailed analysis of the performance of an extensive set of DFT functionals in reproducing accurate binding energies and topological properties for the halogen-bonding interaction of either NCX or PhX molecules (X = F, Cl, Br, I) with the aromatic system of benzene in the T-shaped configuration. It was found that the better performance for both sets of properties is provided by a small subset of functionals able to take into account, implicitly or explicitly (by inclusion of an additive pairwise potential), the dispersion contribution, that is, ωB97X, M06-2X, M11, mPW2PLYP-D, and B2PLYP-D3.
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Molecolari, CNR (CNR-ISTM) and INSTM UdR , Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Forni
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Molecolari, CNR (CNR-ISTM) and INSTM UdR , Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy.|Dipartimento di Chimica and INSTM UdR, Università degli Studi di Milano , Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pieraccini
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Chimica and INSTM UdR, Università degli Studi di Milano , Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Franchini
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Molecolari, CNR (CNR-ISTM) and INSTM UdR , Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy.|Dipartimento di Chimica and INSTM UdR, Università degli Studi di Milano , Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: Maurizio
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sironi