Investigating solvent effects on the magnetic properties of molybdate ions (MoO$_{4}^{2-}$) with relativistic embedding

Abstract

We investigate the ability of mechanical and electronic density functional theory (DFT)-based embedding approaches to describe the solvent effects on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) shielding constants of the $^{95}$Mo nucleus in the molybdate ion in aqueous solution. From the description obtained from calculations with two- and four-component relativistic Hamiltonians, we find that for such systems spin-orbit coupling effects are clearly important for absolute shielding values, but for relative quantities a scalar relativistic treatment provides a sufficient estimation of the solvent effects. We find that the electronic contributions to the solvent effects are relatively modest yet decisive to provide a more accurate magnetic response of the system, when compared to reference supermolecular calculations. We analyze the errors in the embedding calculations by statistical methods as well as through a real-space representation of NMR shielding densities, which are shown to provide a clear picture of the physical processes at play.