Chemical Bonding in Isoelectronic NdO₂and SmO₂²⁺

Abstract

Neodymium dioxide (NdO 2 ) and samarium dioxide cation (SmO 2 2+ ) are isoelectronic molecules. Here we used calculations of the spin−orbit-free wave functions to study and compare their geometries, spin states, and bonding. We used Kohn−Sham density functional theory with the B97-1 exchange-correlation functional to optimize the geometries and found that the two molecules have different ground spin states and structures. NdO 2 favors a linear ONdO triplet structure, and SmO 2 2+ favors a linear SmOO 2+ quintet structure. We then used state-averaged completeactive-space self-consistent-field (SA-CASSCF) calculations to investigate the bonding characteristics of NdO 2 and SmO 2 2+ in various geometries. We found that in NdOO, one electron is transferred from Nd to O, while in SmO 2 2+, there is no electron transfer between Sm and O. The SA-CASSCF calculation also shows that ONdO has a stronger bonding orbital between a 4f orbital of Nd and a p z orbital of oxygen atoms. We compared three multireference methods, namely, extended multistate complete active space second-order perturbation theory (XMS-CASPT2), extended multistate pair-density functional theory (XMS-PDFT), and compressed multistate pair-density functional theory (CMS-PDFT), for calculating the spin−orbit-free energies of various isomers of both molecules. We found that although XMS-PDFT and CMS-PDFT are at the same cost level as SA-CASSCF, they give results with the same accuracy as given for the much more demanding XMS-CASPT2 calculation. Between the two multistate PDFT methods, CMS-PDFT is better at giving good degeneracies for states that should be degenerate.