Assessment of recently developed density functional approaches for the evaluation of the bond length alternation in polyacetylene

The bond length alternation (BLA) of increasingly long polyacetylene oligomers has been computed using various wavefunction methods of increasing accuracy and several DFT models, including standard GGA and the most-recent meta-GGA and hybrid functionals. Our results show the meta-GGA functionals do not offer any significant improvement with respect to the GGA approaches, both providing too small values for the BLA. More accurate results are obtained with hybrid approaches, where, instead, the percent of HF exchange rules the quantitative result. In particular, hybrids including 25% of HF exchange are the most accurate, whereas TPSSh, O3LYP, τ-HCTHh provide only poor estimates.