Weak interactions between tetraphenylporphyrin dimers: A Wannier orbitals study

We investigate the weak interactions taking place in the tetraphenylporphyrin dimers by using Wannier orbitals and DFT. The Van der Waals interaction energies for various geometric configurations of the dimers are then compared to the differences between the total DFT energies of dimers and those of sums over the energies of monomers. The comparison allows us to estimate the weight of the Van der Waals contribution to the total interaction energy since the DFT values include all contributions such as weak chemical interaction or Pauli repulsion to the binding energy. We show that the interaction energy computed with vdW-DF-cx exchange-correlation functional is almost identical with the one computed using Wannier orbitals. By analyzing the properties of Wannier orbitals in monomer and dimer structures, we check the fact the Van der Waals energy can be accurately calculated by using only the orbitals corresponding to the single molecule, which is useful from a practical perspective. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.