ABSTRACT
The continued demand for gas-phase molecular structures has led to the recommissioning of a gas electron diffractometer, formerly housed at the University of Reading. The gas electron diffractometer, now the only one of its kind in the U.K., is currently housed at the University of York, where it is now used routinely to determine directly structures of isolated molecules in the gas phase. The instrument has been fitted with an air-heated nozzle assembly to increase the range of molecules accessible to study in the gas phase; the efficacy of this assembly is demonstrated in this article via the determination of the gas-phase structure of 4-(dimethylamino)benzonitrile (DMABN) at high temperature. A series of complementary theoretical calculations using the B2PLYP DFT functional of Grimme et al. with correlation-consistent basis sets of double, triple, and quadruple-ζ quality are also presented. The agreement between the experimental and theoretical structural parameters attests to the accuracy of the applied theoretical calculations and of our gas-phase structural solution.
ABSTRACT
A series of computational studies have been undertaken to investigate the electronic structures and bonding schemes for six hetero-substituted borane cages, all of which have been presented in the literature as potential hypho structures. The six species are hypho-7,8-[C2B6H13](-) (1a), hypho-7,8-[CSB6H11](-) (1b), hypho-7,8-[S2B6H9](-) (1c), hypho-7,8-[NSB6H11] (1d), exo-7-Me-hypho-7,8-[NCB6H12] (1e), and endo-7-Me-hypho-7,8-[NCB6H12] (1f) and the so-called mno rule has been applied to each of them. As no structural data are known for the carbathia-, azathia-, and dithiahexaboranes, we have also applied the ab initio/GIAO/NMR structural tool for 1b-1d, with 1c having been prepared for this purpose. We conclude that an mno count of 10 means that 1a, 1b, 1d, 1e, and 1f should be termed pseudo-nido or pseudo-hypho. Only 1c can be considered to be correctly termed hypho-7,8-[S2B6H9](-).