Comparative assessment of density functional methods for evaluating essential parameters to simulate SERS spectra within the excited state energy gradient approximation

The prospect of challenges in reproducing and interpretation of resonance Raman properties of molecules interacting with metal clusters has prompted the present research initiative. Resonance Raman spectra based on the time-dependent gradient approximation are examined in the framework of density functional theory using different methods for representing the exchange-correlation functional. In this work the performance of different XC functionals in the prediction of ground state properties, excitation state energies, and gradients are compared and discussed. Resonance Raman properties based on time-dependent gradient approximation for the strongly low-lying charge transfer states are calculated and compared for different methods. We draw the following conclusions: (1) for calculating the binding energy and ground state geometry, dispersion-corrected functionals give the best performance in comparison to ab initio calculations, (2) GGA and meta GGA functionals give good accuracy in calculating vibrational frequencies, (3) excited state energies determined by hybrid and range-separated hybrid functionals are in good agreement with EOM-CCSD calculations, and (4) in calculating resonance Raman properties GGA functionals give good and reasonable performance in comparison to the experiment; however, calculating the excited state gradient by using the hybrid functional on the hessian of GGA improves the results of the hybrid functional significantly. Finally, we conclude that the agreement of charge-transfer surface enhanced resonance Raman spectra with experiment is improved significantly by using the excited state gradient approximation.