A photophysical, electrochemical and computational study has been performed on a homologous series of cyclometallated Pd(II) (1a–f) and Pt(II) (2a–f) complexes of general formula [(C,N)M(O,O)]; (H(C,N) = azobenzene, 2-phenylpyridine, benzo[h]quinoline; M = Pd, Pt; H(O,O) = acetylacetone, hexafluoroacetylacetone). Experimental and computational data have shown the strong influence exerted by electronegativity of the ancillary ligand on the frontier orbitals of the complexes, such an effect being enhanced for the Pt(II) species.

Negative ions are not accurately represented in density functional approximations (DFAs) such as (semi-)local density functionals (LDA or GGA or meta-GGA). This is caused by the much too high orbital energies (not negative enough) with these DFAs compared to the exact Kohn-Sham values. Negative ions very often have positive DFA HOMO energies, hence are unstable. These problems do not occur with the exact Kohn-Sham potential, the anion HOMO energy then being equal to minus the electron affinity. It is therefore desirable to develop sufficiently accurate approximations to the exact Kohn-Sham potential. There are further beneficial effects on the orbital shapes and the density of using a good approximation to the the exact KS potential. Notably the unoccupied orbitals are not unduly diffuse, as they are in the Hartree-Fock model, with hybrid functionals, and even with (semi)local density functional approximations (LDFAs). We show that the recently developed B-GLLB-VWN approximation [Gritsenko et al., J. Chem. Phys. 144, 204114 (2016)] to the exact KS potential affords stable negative ions with HOMO orbital energy close to minus the electron affinity.