Intermolecular bonding and vibrations of phenol⋅H2O (D2O)

Abstract

Extensive ab initio calculations of the phenol⋅H2O complex were performed at the Hartree–Fock level, using the 6-31G(d,p) and 6-311++G(d,p) basis sets. Fully energy-minimized geometries were obtained for (a) the equilibrium structure, which has a translinear H bond and the H2O plane orthogonal to the phenol plane, similar to (H2O)2; (b) the lowest-energy transition state structure, which is nonplanar (C1 symmetry) and has the H2O moiety rotated by ±90°. The calculated MP2/6-311G++(d,p) binding energy including basis set superposition error corrections is 6.08 kcal/mol; the barrier for internal rotation around the H bond is only 0.4 kcal/mol. Intra- and intermolecular harmonic vibrational frequencies were calculated for a number of different isotopomers of phenol⋅H2O. Anharmonic intermolecular vibrational frequencies were computed for several intermolecular vibrations; anharmonic corrections are very large for the β2 intermolecular wag. Furthermore, the H2O torsion τ around the H-bond axis, and the β2 mode are strongly anharmonically coupled, and a two-dimensional τ/β2 potential energy surface was explored. The role of tunneling splitting due to the torsional mode is discussed and tunnel splittings are estimated for the calculated range of barriers. The theoretical studies were complemented by a detailed spectroscopic study of h-phenol⋅H2O and d-phenol⋅D2O employing two-color resonance-two-photon ionization and dispersed fluorescence emission techniques, which extends earlier spectroscopic studies of this system. The β1 and β2 wags of both isotopomers in the S0 and S1 electronic states are newly assigned, as well as several other weaker transitions. Tunneling splittings due to the torsional mode may be important in the S0 state in conjunction with the excitation of the intermolecular σ and β2 modes.