Eliminating Delocalization Error to Improve Heterogeneous Catalysis Predictions with Molecular DFT+U

Abstract

Approximate semilocal density functional theory (DFT) is known to underestimate surface formation energies yet paradoxically overbind adsorbates on catalytic transition-metal oxide surfaces due to delocalization error. The low-cost DFT + U approach only improves surface formation energies for early transition-metal oxides or adsorption energies for late transition-metal oxides. In this work, we demonstrate that this inefficacy arises due to the conventional usage of metal-centered atomic orbitals as projectors within DFT + U. We analyze electron density rearrangement during surface formation and O atom adsorption on rutile transition-metal oxides to highlight that a standard DFT + U correction fails to tune properties when the corresponding density rearrangement is highly delocalized across both metal and oxygen sites. To improve both surface properties simultaneously while retaining the simplicity of a single-site DFT + U correction, we systematically construct multi-atom-centered molecular-orbital-like projectors for DFT + U. We demonstrate this molecular DFT + U approach for tuning adsorption energies and surface formation energies of minimal two-dimensional models of representative early (i.e., TiO2) and late (i.e., PtO2) transition-metal oxides. Molecular DFT + U simultaneously corrects adsorption energies and surface formation energies of multilayer models of rutile TiO2(110) and PtO2(110) to resolve the paradoxical description of surface stability and surface reactivity of semilocal DFT.

Publication
J. Chem. Theory Comput., 18, 1142-1155 (2022)
Heather J. Kulik
Heather J. Kulik
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry