DFT study on the reactions of ClO⁻/BrO⁻ with RCl (R = CH3, C2H5, and C3H7) in gas phase.

Gas-phase reactions of ClO(-)/BrO(-) with RCl (R = CH3, C2H5, and C3H7) have been investigated in detail using the popular DFT functional BHandHLYP/aug-cc-pVDZ level of theory. As a result, our findings strongly suggest that the type of reaction is firstly initiated by a typical SN2 fashion. Subsequently, two competitive substitution steps, named as SN2-induced substitution and SN2-induced elimination, respectively, would proceed before the initial SN2 product ion-dipole complex separates, in which the former exhibits less reactivity than the latter. Those are consistent with relevant experimental results. Moreover, we have also explored reactivity difference for the title reactions in term of some factors derived from methyl group, p-π electronic conjugation, ionization energy (IE), as well as molecular orbital (MO) analysis.