A combined electronic structure and molecular dynamics approach to computing the OH vibrational feature of strongly hydrogen-bonded carboxylic acids

Medium and strong hydrogen bonds give rise to vibrational features that can span several hundreds of wavenumbers and have unusual line shapes. For example, dimers consisting of carboxylic acids hydrogen-bonded to nitrogen-containing aromatic bases exhibit a vibrational feature that spans over 900 cm(-1) and contains two very broad peaks. In this report, we demonstrate how this feature can be reproduced using a combined molecular dynamics (MD) and electronic structure spectral map approach, which has been very successful in modeling the vibrational spectrum of water in different environments. In this approach, spectral maps are created, relating the transition frequencies and probabilities to the electric field along the OH bond, which are obtained from the density functional theory calculations of snapshots taken from a classical MD simulation. This map was used to compute the spectral properties of thousands of geometries of the pyridine-acetic acid dimer sampled by a MD simulation, which were used to compute the overall spectral feature. It was found that this approach reproduced the experimental spectrum better than the previous dimer stretch approaches (which were based on describing the dimer geometries harmonically) through a more accurate sampling of dimer geometries. The broadness of these vibrational features largely originates from the range of geometries present in the condensed phase, while the unusual line shape is caused by strong Fermi resonances. Published by AIP Publishing.