Fragment-Based Electronic Structure Approach for Computing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Chemical Shifts in Molecular Crystals

First-principles chemical shielding tensor predictions play a critical role in studying molecular crystal structures using nuclear magnetic resonance. Fragment-based electronic structure methods have dramatically improved the ability to model molecular crystal structures and energetics using high-level electronic structure methods. Here, a many-body expansion fragment approach is applied to the calculation of chemical shielding tensors in molecular crystals. First, the impact of truncating the many-body expansion at different orders and the role of electrostatic embedding are examined on a series of molecular clusters extracted from molecular crystals. Second, the ability of these techniques to assign three polymorphic forms of the drug sulfanilamide to the corresponding experimental 13C spectra is assessed. This challenging example requires discriminating among spectra whose 13C chemical shifts differ by only a few parts per million (ppm) across the different polymorphs. Fragment-based PBE0/6-311+G­(2d,p) level chemical shielding predictions correctly assign these three polymorphs and reproduce the sulfanilamide experimental 13C chemical shifts with 1 ppm accuracy. The results demonstrate that fragment approaches are competitive with the widely used gauge-invariant projector augmented wave (GIPAW) periodic density functional theory calculations.