S. Coussan et al., INFRARED PHOTOISOMERIZATION OF THE METHANOL DIMER TRAPPED IN ARGON MATRIX - MONOCHROMATIC IRRADIATION EXPERIMENTS AND DFT CALCULATIONS, Chemical physics, 219(2-3), 1997, pp. 221-234
In a first part we propose an accurate assignment of the vibrational s
pectra of (CH3OH)(2) and ((CH3OH)-O-18)(2) trapped in argon at 7 K, wh
ich differentiates the proton donor (PD) and proton acceptor (PA) mole
cules of four open chain conformers stable at this temperature. Then w
e describe the effects of monochromatic irradiations in the OH and CO
stretching regions which give rise not only to interconversions betwee
n these conformers but also to the appearance of one highly unstable s
pecies with a lifetime of about 4 minutes at 7 K. Its structure is dis
cussed in the framework of DFT calculations after having checked the r
eliability of the method on the stable dimeric form. (C) 1997 Elsevier
Science B.V.