Predicting the structures and vibrational spectra of molecular crystals containing large molecules with the generalized energy-based fragmentation approach

The generalized energy-based fragmentation (GEBF) approach under periodic boundary conditions (PBCs) has been developed to facilitate calculations of molecular crystals containing large molecules. The PBC-GEBF approach can help predict structures and properties of molecular crystals at different theory levels by performing molecular quantum chemistry calculations on a series of non-periodic subsystems constructed from the studied systems. A more rigorous formula of the forces on translational vectors of molecular crystals was proposed and implemented, enabling more reliable predictions of crystal structures. Our benchmark results on several typical molecular crystals show that the PBC-GEBF approach could reproduce the forces on atoms and the translational vectors and the optimized crystal structures from the corresponding conventional periodic methods. The improved PBC-GEBF approach is then applied to predict the crystal structures and vibrational spectra of two molecular crystals containing large molecules. The PBC-GEBF approach can provide a satisfactory description on the crystal structure of a molecular crystal containing 312 atoms in a unit cell at density-fitting second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation theory and density functional theory (DFT) levels and the infrared vibrational spectra of another molecular crystal containing 864 atoms in a unit cell at the DFT level. The PBC-GEBF approach is expected to be a promising theoretical tool for electronic structure calculations on molecular crystals containing large molecules.