Simon Liebing

Fermi–Löwdin orbitals (FLOs) are a special set of localized orbitals, which have become commonly used in combination with the Perdew–Zunger self-interaction correction (SIC) in the FLO-SIC method. The FLOs are obtained for a set of occupied orbitals by specifying a classical position for each electron. These positions are known as Fermi-orbital descriptors (FODs), and they have a clear relation to chemical bonding. In this study, we show how FLOs and FODs can be used to initialize, interpret, and justify SIC solutions in a common chemical picture, both within FLO-SIC and in traditional variational SIC, and to locate distinct local minima in either of these approaches. We demonstrate that FLOs based on Lewis theory lead to symmetry breaking for benzene—the electron density is found to break symmetry already at the symmetric molecular structure—while ones from Linnett’s double-quartet theory reproduce symmetric electron densities and molecular geometries. Introducing a benchmark set of 16 planar cyclic molecules, we show that using Lewis theory as the starting point can lead to artifactual dipole moments of up to 1 D, while Linnett SIC dipole moments are in better agreement with experimental values. We suggest using the dipole moment as a diagnostic of symmetry breaking in SIC and monitoring it in all SIC calculations. We show that Linnett structures can often be seen as superpositions of Lewis structures and propose Linnett structures as a simple way to describe aromatic systems in SIC with reduced symmetry breaking. The role of hovering FODs is also briefly discussed.

Electronic structure and transport characteristics of coupled CdS and ZnSe quantum dots are studied using density functional theory and non equilibrium Greens function method respectively. Our investigations show that in these novel coupled dots, the Frontier occupied and unoccupied molecular orbitals are spatially located in two different parts, thereby indicating the possibility of asymmetry in electronic transport. We have calculated electronic transport through the coupled quantum dot by varying the coupling strength between the individual quantum dots in the limits of weak and strong coupling. Calculations reveal asymmetric current vs voltage curves in both the limits indicating the rectifying properties of the coupled quantum dots. Additionally we discuss the possibility to tune the switching behavior of the coupled dots by different gate geometries.

Without self-interaction corrections or the use of hybrid functionals, approximations to the density-functional theory (DFT) often favor intermediate spin systems over high-spin systems. In this paper, we apply the recently proposed Fermi–Löwdin-orbital self-interaction corrected density functional formalism to a simple tetra-coordinated Fe(II)-porphyrin molecule and show that the energetic orderings of the S = 1 and S = 2 spin states are changed qualitatively relative to the results of Generalized Gradient Approximation (developed by Perdew, Burke, and Ernzerhof, PBE-GGA) and Local Density Approximation (developed by Perdew and Wang, PW92-LDA). Because the energetics, associated with changes in total spin, are small, we have also calculated the second-order spin–orbit energies and the zero-point vibrational energies to determine whether such corrections could be important in metal-substituted porphins. Our results find that the size of the spin–orbit and vibrational corrections to the energy orderings are small compared to the changes due to the self-interaction correction. Spin dependencies in the Infrared (IR)/Raman spectra and the zero-field splittings are provided as a possible means for identifying the spin in porphyrins containing Fe(II).

New Ni^IIformate complexes were synthesized and characterized to exhibit low decomposition temperatures to produce pure metallic nickel.