Ab initio calculations on phenol–water

The structures of the three phenol–water minima are optimized with MP2 and the interaction-optimized DZPi basis set. Single point calculations are carried out using the slightly larger ESPB basis set, which contains a set of (s,p) bond functions at the midpoint of the hydrogen-bond. The binding energies and hydrogen-bond distances are corrected for basis set superposition error. For all minima, our binding energies D_e are larger than the previous theoretical estimates. Despite this, our best estimate of the binding energy D₀ for the global minimum, 21.08 kJ/mol, is about 2 kJ/mol smaller than the experimental values (23.45±0.48 and 22.92±0.36 kJ/mol).