Gas Phase Silver Thermochemistry from First Principles

Abstract

Domain-based local pair natural orbital coupled cluster approach with single, double, and perturbative triple excitations, DLPNO–CCSD(T), has been applied within a framework of a reduced version of the reaction-based Feller–Peterson–Dixon (FPD) scheme to predict gas phase heats of formation and absolute entropies of silver inorganic and organometallic compounds. First, we evaluated all existing experimental data currently limited by thermodynamic functions of 10 silver substances (AgH, AgF, AgBr, AgI, Ag2, Ag2S, Ag2Se, Ag2Te, AgCN, AgPO2). The mean average deviation between computed and experimental heats of formation was found to be 1.9 kcal/mol. Notably, all predicted heats of formation turned out to be within the error bounds of their experimental counterparts. Second, we predicted heats of formation and entropies for additional 90 silver species with no experimental data available, substantially enriching silver thermochemistry. Combination of gas phase heats of formation ΔHf and entropies S° of AgNO2, AgSCN, Ag2SO4, and Ag2SeO4 obtained in this work, with respective solid-state information, resulted in accurate sublimation thermochemistry of these compounds. Complementation of predicted ΔHf with heats of formation of some neutrals and positive ions produced 33 silver bond strengths of high reliability. Obtained thermochemical data are promising for developing the concepts of silver chemistry. In addition, derived heats of formation and bond dissociation enthalpies, due to their high diversity, are found to be relevant for testing and training of computational chemistry methods.