Convex–concave stacking of curved conjugated networks: Benchmark calculations on the corannulene dimer

High level ab initio calculations on the eclipsed concave–convex corannulene dimer yielded a binding energy of 15.5 kcal/mol with a monomer–monomer distance of 3.69 Å at the (extrapolated) counterpoise corrected QCISD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ level. Single point calculations at the CCSD(T) level demonstrated that CCSD(T) and QCISD(T) results for the binding energy are virtually identical. Dispersion corrected DFT functionals (B97-D, M06-2X and ωB97X-D) combined with the cc-pVQZ basis set gave reasonable estimations of the binding energies and minimum energy separation of the monomers. Studies of several other motifs of the corannulene dimer were also carried out at the B97-D/cc-pVQZ level.