Improving the calculation of electron paramagnetic resonance hyperfine coupling tensors for d-block metals

Calculation of hyperfine coupling constants (HFCs) of Electron Paramagnetic Resonance from first principles can be a beneficial complement to experimental data in cases where the molecular structure is unknown. We have recently investigated basis set convergence of HFCs in d-block complexes and obtained a set of basis functions for the elements Sc-Zn, which were saturated with respect to both the Fermi contact and spin-dipolar components of the hyperfine coupling tensor [Hedegard et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput., 2011, 7, 4077-4087]. Furthermore, a contraction scheme was proposed leading to very accurate, yet efficient basis sets for the elements Sc-Zn. Here this scheme is tested against a larger test set of molecules and a wider range of DFT functionals. We further investigate the regular aug-cc-pVTZ and core-valence correlation aug-cc-pCVTZ basis sets as well as another core-property basis set, CP(PPP). While aug-cc-pVTZ-J provides hyperfine coupling constants that are almost identical to the converged series (aug-cc-pVTZ-Juc), we observe that not only the regular but also the core-valence correlation basis sets provide results far from the converged results. The usage of specialized core-basis sets leads to a large and highly significant improvement of the calculated hyperfine couplings in comparison with experimental data.