Density functional theory study of the vertical ionization energies of the valence and core electrons of cyclopentadiene, pyrrole, furan, and thiophene

The procedure abbreviated as Delta PBE0(SAOP)/et-pVQZ, based on density functional theory, was developed recently for the calculation of vertical ionization energies of the valence electrons of organic and other small molecules and succeeded in giving results with an average absolute deviation of 0.21 eV from experiment for a collection of 115 reliable test cases of nonperhalo molecules. The objective of this work is to add a number of test cases to the benchmark database. We chose the set of molecules cyclo-C4H4X, with X = CH2, NH, O, and S, previously studied by many workers both experimentally and theoretically. The results show that the Delta PBE0(SAOP)/et-pVQZ procedure is not only as good as ab initio methods such as SAC-CI, OVGF, and ADC(3) in performance, but also handles inner valence ionized cations more efficiently. Although the core-electron binding energies of the titled molecules have not been as well investigated theoretically, we apply the methods we developed in recent years to calculate the binding energies of C1s, N1s, O1s, S1s, and S2p, which compare well with available experimental data.