Bjc. Cabral et al., DENSITY-FUNCTIONAL AND DENSITY-FUNCTIONAL REACTION FIELD CALCULATIONSOF THE MOLECULAR-PROPERTIES OF PHENOL, Chemical physics letters, 258(3-4), 1996, pp. 436-444
Several molecular properties of phenol in the gas phase and in a diele
ctric medium representing liquid water were calculated. The calculatio
ns were based on ab initio and density-functional methods. It is shown
that the latter provide a good description of the molecular propertie
s of phenol. An analysis of the electrostatic solvent effects on these
properties, based on the self-consistent reaction field, indicates th
at the influence of a polar dielectric environment on the molecular pr
operties of phenol is modest. The most significant changes, when a com
parison is made with gas phase properties, concern the red shift of th
e vibrational modes related to the C-H and O-H stretching vibrations,
This result is in keeping with recent studies of phenol-(H2O)(n) (n =
1, 3) complexes, which predicted a significant red shift for the pheno
lic O-H vibration with an increase in n. The importance of this effect
seems, however, to be considerably reduced in the uniform dielectric
environment and this result also suggests that the underestimation of
the electrostatic solvent effects on the molecular properties of pheno
l is related to the limitations of the present approach based on the O
nsager model.