DENSITY-FUNCTIONAL CALCULATIONS ON FIRST-ROW TRANSITION-METALS

The excitation energies and ionization potentials of the atoms in the first transition series are notoriously difficult to compute accuratel y. Errors in calculated excitation energies can range from 1 to 4 eV a t the Hartree-Fock level, and errors as high as 1.5 eV are encountered for ionization energies. In the current work we present and discuss t he results of a systematic study of the first transition series using a spin-restricted Kohn-Sham density-functional method with the gradien t-corrected functionals of Becke and Lee, Yang and Pan: Ionization ene rgies are observed to be in good agreement with experiment, with a mea n absolute error of approximately 0.15 eV; these results are comparabl e to the most accurate calculations to date, the quadratic configurati on interaction single, double (triple) [QCISD(T)] calculations of Ragh avachari and Trucks. Excitation energies are calculated with a mean er ror of approximately 0.5 eV, compared with similar to 1 eV for the loc al density approximation and 0.1 eV for QCISD(T). These gradient-corre cted functionals appear to offer an attractive compromise between accu racy and computational effort.