Ab Initio Thermochemistry with High-Level Isodesmic Corrections: Validation of the ATOMIC Protocol for a Large Set of Compounds with First-Row Atoms (H, C, N, O, F)†

The recently proposed ATOMIC protocol is a fully ab initio thermochemical approach designed to provide accurate atomization energies for molecules with well-defined valence structures. It makes consistent use of the concept of bond-separation reactions to supply high-level precomputed bond increments which correct for errors of lower-level models. The present work extends the approach to the calculation of standard heats of formation and validates it by comparison to experimental and benchmark level ab initio data reported in the literature. Standard heats of formation (298 K) have been compiled for a large sample of 173 neutral molecules containing hydrogen and first-row atoms (C, N, O, F), resorting to several previous compilations and to the original experimental literature. Statistical evaluation shows that the simplest implementation of the ATOMIC protocol (composite model C) achieves an accuracy comparable to the popular Gaussian-3 approach and that composite models A and B perform better. Chemical ...