The polyacene tend to transition from closed-shell to open-shell singlet systems with increase in the number of linearly fused benzene rings thus, enriching it's electronic as well as magnetic properties. Here, we have probed the role of such a polyacene couplers in mediating the magnetic exchange coupling between nitroxy radicals. For this, magnetic exchange coupling constants (<i>2J</i>) are computed employing broken-symmetry approach within density functional theory (DFT) as well as symmetry-adopted wave function based multi-configuration approach. Within DFT approach, apart from most commonly used exchange-correlation functional (generalized gradient approximation (GGA), meta-GGA, and hybrid) constrained spin density (CDFT) and on-site Coulomb correlation corrected GGA+<i>U</i> functionals have also been used to evaluate the exchange coupling constants in the diradicals. All DFT based methods approximate an exponential increase in the coupling constant values with increase in the length of the coupler. This is indeed an unexpected observation with no experimental report available to such an outcome by DFT calculations. Therefore, the electronic structures for these diradical systems with the increase in number of benzene rings were looked upon thoroughly. The properties like increase in number of degenerate or quasi-degenerate molecular orbitals (MOs), the lowering in energy of low-lying excited states and the development of intrinsic radical character of the coupler add to the complexity in evaluation of <i>2J </i>values for such diradical systems with DFT approach. Consequently, wave function based multi-reference approach (CAASCF/NEVPT2) has been adopted. The active space has been limited to π-orbitals which are found to play an important role in the magnetic exchange interactions. With increase in the coupler size, the active space even with only π obitals would increase enormously which could not be taken into account even in the CASSCF study. The limited active space calculations also indicate quite strong exchange interaction, thus in principle, supporting the DFT observations of long-range magnetic exchange interactions but not an exponential increase in <i>2J</i> with length of couplers.
Theoretical prediction of magnetic exchange coupling constants from broken-symmetry coupled cluster calculations