Ab initio spectrograms of the molecular vibrational spectrum

Abstract

Theoretical spectrograms of the vibrational spectrum of 3,3-dimethylcyclopropene were constructed and juxtaposed with the experimental Raman and IR spectrograms. The theoretical spectrograms are represented as sets of vertical lines starting from the points corresponding to the values of the vibrational frequencies calculated from the scaled quantum-mechanical (QM) force field obtained at the HF/6-31G*//HF/6-31G* level. Two theoretical Raman spectrograms were constructed. In the first case, the heights of the vertical lines correspond to the QM values of the Raman scattering activities. In the second case they represent the relative differential Raman cross-sections calculated using the QM values of Raman scattering activities. The initial vibrational mode matrix remains virtually unchanged upon scaling of the QM force constant matrix because the dispersion of the scale factor values is low. Therefore, the heights of the theoretical lines for the IR spectrogram represent the QM intensities directly. The theoretical spectrogram based on the relative differential Raman cross-sections was shown to depict the experimental Raman spectrum more adequately. This makes it possible to use the results of the corresponding QM calculations more completely and obtain well-substantiated assignments of the vibrational frequencies.