Time dependent density functional theory calculations for electronic circular dichroism spectra and optical rotations of conformationally flexible chiral donor-acceptor dyad.

Twelve conformations of a chiral donor-acceptor (charge-transfer) dyad and six conformations of its dimer complex were structurally optimized by using the Kohn-Sham density functional theory (BLYP/TZV2P) incorporating a recently developed empirical correction scheme that uses C6/R6 potentials for van der Waals interactions (DFT-D). Subsequent time-dependent DFT calculations with BH-LYP and B3-LYP functionals (with triple-zeta basis set) were performed to obtain theoretical circular dichroism (CD) spectra. The experimental CD spectra obtained independently were properly reproduced by averaging the calculated spectra of individual conformers according to a Boltzmann population derived from single-point SCS-MP2 energies. The optical rotations of the monomer were also calculated by using the same functionals with an aug-cc-pVDZ basis set. Dielectric continuum solvation models (COSMO) applied to correct the relative energies from the isolated molecule calculations resulted in conformer distributions that piled the same or even poorer level of agreement with the experimental CD spectrum. Our results clearly show the advantage of the DFT-D method for the geometry optimization of large systems with donor-acceptor interactions and the TD-DFT/BH-LYP calculations for reproducing the experimental CD spectra. As compared with the calculated optical rotations, the wealthy information embedded in the experimental/calculated CD spectra is requisite for the configurational and/or conformational analyses of relatively large and flexible chiral organic molecules in solution.