Volume 134, Issue 6 e202110716
Aufsatz

Quantifying Mechanical Properties of Molecular Crystals: A Critical Overview of Experimental Elastic Tensors

Dr. Peter R. Spackman

Dr. Peter R. Spackman

School of Molecular Sciences, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Perth, WA, 6009 Australia

School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley, WA, 6102 Australia

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Dr. Arnaud Grosjean

Dr. Arnaud Grosjean

School of Molecular Sciences, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Perth, WA, 6009 Australia

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Dr. Sajesh P. Thomas

Dr. Sajesh P. Thomas

Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, Langelandsgade 140, 8000 Århus C, Denmark

Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016 India

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Dr. Durga Prasad Karothu

Dr. Durga Prasad Karothu

Smart Materials Lab, New York University Abu Dhabi, PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

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Prof. Panče Naumov

Prof. Panče Naumov

Smart Materials Lab, New York University Abu Dhabi, PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Molecular Design Institute, Department of Chemistry, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY, 10003 USA

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Prof. Mark A. Spackman

Corresponding Author

Prof. Mark A. Spackman

School of Molecular Sciences, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Perth, WA, 6009 Australia

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First published: 18 October 2021
Citations: 5

Dedicated to Professor Hans-Beat Bürgi on the occasion of his 80th birthday

Abstract

This review presents a critical and comprehensive overview of current experimental measurements of complete elastic constant tensors for molecular crystals. For a large fraction of these molecular crystals, detailed comparisons are made with elastic tensors obtained using the corrected small basis set Hartree–Fock method S-HF-3c, and these are shown to be competitive with many of those obtained from more sophisticated density functional theory plus dispersion (DFT-D) approaches. These detailed comparisons between S-HF-3c, experimental and DFT-D computed tensors make use of a novel rotation-invariant spherical harmonic description of the Young's modulus, and identify outliers among sets of independent experimental results. The result is a curated database of experimental elastic tensors for molecular crystals, which we hope will stimulate more extensive use of elastic tensor information—experimental and computational—in studies aimed at correlating mechanical properties of molecular crystals with their underlying crystal structure.

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