M. Gottselig et al., Mode selective stereomutation and parity violation in disulfane isotopomers H2S2, D2S2, T2S2, HELV CHIM A, 84(6), 2001, pp. 1846-1861
We report quantitative calculations of stereomutation tunneling in the disu
lfane isotopomers H2S2, D2S2, and T2S2, which are chiral in their equilibri
um geometry. The quasi-adiabatic channel quasi-harmonic reaction path Hamil
tonian approach used here treats stereomutation including all internal degr
ees of freedom. The torsional motion is handled as an anharmonic reaction c
oordinate in detail. whereas all the remaining degrees of freedom are taken
into account approximately. We predict how stereomutation is catalyzed or
inhibited by excitation of the various vibrational modes. The agreement of
our theoretical results with spectroscopic data from the literature on H2S2
and D2S2 is excellent. We furthermore predict the influence of parity viol
ation on stereomutation as characterized approximately by the ratio (DeltaE
(pv)/DeltaE(+/-)) of the (local or vibrationally averaged) parity violating
potential DeltaE(pv) and the tunneling splittings DeltaE(+) in the symmetr
ical case. This ratio is exceedingly small for the reference molecules H2O2
and D2O2, and still very small (2(.)10(-6) cm(-1)) for H2S2, which, thus,
all exhibit essentially parity conservation in the dynamics. However. for D
2S2 it is ca. 0.002, and for T2S2 it is ca. 1, which seems to be the first
case where such intermediate mixing through parity violation is quantitativ
ely predicted for spectroscopically accessible molecules. The consequences
for the spectroscopic detection of molecular parity violation are discussed
briefly also in relation to other molecules.