Solvatochromic shifts of Br₂ and I₂ in water cages of type 5¹², 5¹²6², 5¹²6³, and 5¹²6⁴.

Abstract

Despite the relatively small size of molecular bromine and iodine, the physicochemical behavior in different solvents is not yet fully understood, in particular when excited-state properties are sought. In this work, we investigate isolated halogen molecules trapped in clathrate hydrate cages. Relativistic supermolecular calculations reveal that the environment shift to the excitation energies of the (nondegenerate) states 3Πu and 1Πu lie within a spread of 0.05 eV, respectively, suggesting that environment shifts can be estimated with scalar-relativistic treatments. As even scalar-relativistic calculations are problematic for excited-state calculations for clathrates with growing size and basis sets, we have applied the subsystem-based scheme frozen-density embedding, which avoids a supermolecular treatment. This allows for the calculation of excited states for extended clusters with coupled-cluster methods and basis sets of triple-zeta quality with additional diffuse functions mandatory for excited-state properties, as well as a facile treatment at scalar-relativistic exact two-component level of theory for the heavy atoms bromine and iodine. This simple approach yields scalar-relativistic estimates for solvatochromic shifts introduced by the clathrate cages.