Cation-cation "attraction": when London dispersion attraction wins over Coulomb repulsion.

London forces are omnipresent in nature and relevant to molecular engineering. Proper tuning of their energetic contribution may stabilize molecular aggregates, which would be otherwise highly unstable by virtue of other overwhelming repulsive terms. The literature contains a number of such noncovalently bonded molecular aggregates, of which the "binding mode" has never been thoroughly settled. Among those are the emblematic cationic complexes of tetrakis(isonitrile)rhodium(I) studied by a number of researchers. The propensity of these complexes to spontaneously produce oligomers has been an "open case" for years. For the dimer [(PhNC)(4)Rh](2)(2+), one of the archetypes of such oligomers, density functional theory methods (DFT-D3) and wave function based spin-component-scaled second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (SCS-MP2) quantum chemical calculations indicate that when the eight isonitrile ligands arrange spatially in an optimal π-stacked fashion, the energy due to dispersion not only overcomes coulombic repulsion but also the entropy penalty of complex formation. This central role of long-range electron correlation explains such cation-cation attractive interactions. Furthermore, the present findings relativize the role of the metal-metal "d(8)-d(8)" interactions, which are present on a relatively small scale compared to the effects of the ligands; d(8)-d(8) interactions represent about 10-15% of the total dispersion contribution to the binding energy.