Theoretical Investigation on Photoionization and Dissociative Photoionization of Toluene

Abstract

The photoionization and dissociation photoionization of toluene have been studied using quantum chemistry methods. The geometries and frequencies of the reactants, transition states and products have been performed at B3LYP/6-311++G(d,p) level, and single-point energy calculations for all the stationary points were carried out at DFT calculations of the optimized structures with the G3B3 level. The ionization energies of toluene and the appearance energies for major fragment ions, C7H7+, C6H5+, C5H6+, C5H5+, are determined to be 8.90, 11.15 or 11.03, 12.72, 13.69, 16.28 eV, respectively, which are all in good agreement with published experimental data. With the help of available published experimental data and theoretical results, four dissociative photoionization channels have been proposed: C7H7++H, C6H5++CH3, C5H6++C2H2, C5H5++C2H2+H. Transition structures and intermediates for those isomerization processes are determined in this work. Especially, the structures of C5H6+ and C5H5+ produced by dissociative photoionization of toluene have been defined as chain structure in this work with theoretical calculations.