Density Functional Theory for Microwave Spectroscopy of Noncovalent Complexes: A Benchmark Study

In this work, we compare the results obtained with 89 computational methods for predicting noncovalent bond lengths in weakly bound complexes. Evaluations for the performance in noncovalent interaction energies and covalent bond lengths obtained from five other data sets are included. The overall best performing density functional is the ωB97M-V method, achieving balanced results across all three categories. For noncovalent geometries, the best methods include B97M-V, B3LYP-D3­(BJ) and DSD-PBEPBE-D3­(BJ). The effects of systematic improvement of the density functional approximation and of dispersion corrections are also discussed.