The Role of Many-Body Dispersion Interactions in Molecular Crystal Polymorphism

Molecular crystals often have several polymorphs that are close in energy (few meV per molecule), but possess very different physical and chemical properties. Treating polymorphism from first principles has been a long standing problem because conventional density-functional theory (DFT) lacks a proper description of long-range dispersion interactions that govern the structure and energetics of molecular crystals. Here we assess the effect of the many-body dispersion (MBD) energy on the structure and relative energies of the polymorphs of benchmark molecular crystals: glycine, alanine, and para-diiodobenzene. This is accomplished by using the recently developed first-principles DFT+MBD method [A. Tkatchenko, R.A. DiStasio Jr., R. Car, M. Scheffler, submitted], based on the earlier Tkatchenko-Scheffler (TS) dispersion correction [PRL 102, 073005 (2009)]. We show that the non-additive MBD energy plays a crucial role in making qualitatively and quantitatively accurate predictions for the structure and relative energies of polymorphs.