Computing spectroscopic features of molecules is always an interesting challenge, specially when intermolecular contacts are into play. Take vibrational spectroscopy for instance, all the non-covalent interactions present in a solid will have an important effect on the the calculated frequencies and their intensities. However calculating the spectroscopical properties of a solid quickly becomes a daunting task.

My colleague and friend Dr. Vojtech Jancik asked me to calculate the Raman frequencies for a new compound: Selenoyl bis-carboxylate, which according to him was very hard to obtain due to the very nature of selenium. So we performed various calculations on the isolated molecule to reproduce the measured Raman spectrum but we soon realized that a calculation on the crystal cell was needed if we wanted to get a more thorough picture of the experiment.

The level of theory used was PBEPBE/LANL2DZ. Optimization of the title structure pointed to a low coordination capacity by carboxylate groups as evidenced by the longer Se -O-C=O distances and reduced Wiberg bond indexes. A blue shift was observed for all bands and so we calculated the Raman frequencies at the crystal structure which gave us a better correspondence between spectra. Finally we computed the Raman spectra for the full unit cell comprised of four molecules with which an excellent agreement was obtained (a scaling factor of 0.8 was used).

Unfortunately we failed to further extend this calculation to a larger system with four unit cells and 32 molecules apparently due to insufficient memory; the calculation just stalled and stopped without error after consuming its time in the queue. I’ll try to take a look into it some day.

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You can read the whole story in: Synthesis and Crystal Structure of the First Selenonyl Bis(carboxylate) SeO2(O2CCH3)2
Lukas Richtera · Vojtech Jancik · Joaquín Barroso‐Flores · Petr Nykel · Jiri Touzin · Jan Taraba

European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry 06/2015; 2015(18):2923–2927. DOI:10.1002/ejic.201500271
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Thanks for reading!

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