Accuracy of Calculated Chemical Shifts in Carbon 1s Ionization Energies from Single-Reference ab Initio Methods and Density Functional Theory

A database of 77 adiabatic carbon 1s ionization energies has been prepared, covering linear and cyclic alkanes and alkenes, linear alkynes, and methyl- or fluoro-substituted benzenes. Individual entries are believed to carry uncertainties of less than 30 meV in ionization energies and less than 20 meV for shifts in ionization energies. The database provides an unprecedented opportunity for assessing the accuracy of theoretical schemes for computing inner-shell ionization energies and their corresponding chemical shifts. Chemical shifts in carbon is ionization energies have been computed for all molecules in the database using Hartree-Fock, Moller-Plesset (MP) many-body perturbation theory of order 2 and 3 as well as various approximations to full MP4, and the coupled-cluster approximation with single- and double-excitation operators (CCSD) and also including a perturbational estimate of the energy effect of triple-excitation operators (CCSD(T)). Moreover, a wide range of contemporary density functional theory (DFT) methods are also evaluated with respect to computing experimental shifts in C1s ionization energies. Whereas the top ab initio methods reproduce the observed shifts almost to within the experimental uncertainty, even the best-performing DFT approaches meet with twice the root-mean-squared error and thrice the maximum error compared to CCSD(T). However, a number of different density energy functionals still afford sufficient accuracy to become tools in the analysis of complex C1s photoelectron spectra.