Ab Initio calculation of 19F NMR chemical shielding for alkaline‐earth‐metal fluorides

Gauge‐independent atomic orbital (GIAO) method at Hartree‐Fock (HF) and density functional theory (DFT) levels, respectively, was employed to calculate ¹⁹F NMR chemical shieldings of solid state alkaline‐earth‐metal fluorides MF₂ (M = Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba). The results show that, although the calculated ¹⁹F chemical shieldings tend to be larger than the experimental values, they have a fairly good linear relationship with the observed ones. The calculated results based on different combinations of basis sets show that the B3LYP (a hybrid of DFT with HF) predictions are greatly superior to the HF predictions. When a basis set of metal atom with effective core potential (ECP) has well representation of valence wavefunction, especially wavefunction of d component, and proper definition of core electron number, it can be applied to obtain ¹⁹F chemical shielding which is close to that of all‐electron calculation. The variation of ¹⁹F chemical shielding of alkaline‐earth‐metal fluorides correlates well with the lattice factor A/R².