Does One-third Scheme of PBE0 Functional Dominate Over PBE0 for Electronic Properties of Transition Metal Compounds?

The one-third paradigm of PBE0 density functional, PBE0-1/3, has shown to be a successful method for various properties. In this paper, the applicability of PBE0-1/3 is put into broader perspective for transition metals chemistry. As a comparative study, the performance of PBE0 and PBE0-1/3 has been assessed for geometries and vibrational frequencies of some transition metal hydrides and transition metal containing molecules, and static dipole polarizabilities and dipole moments for transition metal halides. The numerical results show that although PBE0-1/3 performs better than the parent PBE0 for response properties of small molecules, it does not approach the quality of PBE0 for structural parameters. Overall, the results of this investigation suggest that there is no real incentive to use PBE0-1/3 in place of PBE0 for calculations involving transition metals. However, it remains challenging to develop a generally density functional resolving all the qualitative failures of previous approximations at a reasonable computational cost.