Noncollinear spins provide a self-consistent treatment of the low-spin state of a biomimetic oxomanganese synthetic trimer inspired by the oxygen evolving complex of photosystem II

We employ noncollinear density functional theory to show that the low-spin state of Mn3 in a model of the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II avoids frustrated spin coupling by adopting a noncollinear arrangement of spins, thereby lowering the energy by 7 kcal/mol. The high-spin state also has noncollinear spins. The optimum self-consistent field solutions for this multinuclear oxomanganese complex correspond to states that cannot be described by the unrestricted Slater determinants used in Kohn-Sham collinear density functional methods. This kind of spin coupling can be important in many open-shell systems, and the conventional collinear spin interpretation of chemical bonding in such systems should be viewed with caution. © 2011 American Chemical Society.