Local reactivity descriptors from degenerate frontier molecular orbitals

Conceptual Density Functional Theory (DFT) has proposed a set of local descriptors to measure the reactivity on specific sites of a molecule, as an example dual descriptor has been successfully used in analyzing interesting systems to understand their local reactivity, however under the frozen orbital approximation (FOA), it is defined from non-degenerate frontier molecular orbitals (FMOs). In this work, the degeneration is taken into account to propose approximated expressions to obtain the dual descriptor, nucleophilic and electrophilic Fukui functions in closed-shell systems. The proposed expressions have been tested on molecules presenting degenerate FMOs. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.