New theoretical and experimental infrared results on formaldehyde in solution

J Phys Chem A. 2006 Jun 29;110(25):7793-800. doi: 10.1021/jp061572u.

Abstract

An extension of our combined procedure to determine a complete quartic force field and to resolve a vibrational problem thanks to a variational treatment is proposed for quantitative calculations of vibrational spectra in solution. Energies and gradients are obtained through a polarizable continuum model (PCM), the so-called self-consistent isodensity (SCI)-PCM. We present in this paper new experimental results dealing with formaldehyde in solution in cyclohexane, chloroform, THF, acetonitrile, DMSO and water; the obtained vibrational spectra are then compared with CCSD(T)/cc-pVQZ calculations. In addition, density functional theory (DFT) calculations have been carried out with the aim of both anticipating and positioning these approaches for larger sized molecules.