Abstract
Abstract Deuterium isotope effects in the keto-enol tautomerism of β-dicarbonyl compounds (malonaldehyde, acetylacetone, dibenzoylmethane, and avobenzone) have been studied using a B3LYP+D functional level of multi-component density functional theory (MC_DFT), which can directly take nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) of the hydrogen nuclei into account. We clearly show that the keto-enol energy difference becomes smaller by deuterium substitution, which is in reasonable agreement with the corresponding experimental evidence. Our MC_DFT study also reveals the hydrogen/deuterium (H/D) isotope effect in geometries and shows that the deuterium substitution weakens the intramolecular hydrogen-bonded interaction in the enol form. Direct treatment of NQEs of hydrogen nuclei via the MC_DFT method is essential for analyzing the H/D isotope effect in keto-enol tautomerism of β-dicarbonyl compounds. Such isotope effects cannot be reproduced in the conventional DFT scheme with harmonic zero-point vibrational corrections.
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