Consistent assignment of the vibrations of symmetric and asymmetric meta-disubstituted benzenes

The assignment of vibrational structure in spectra gives valuable insights into geometric and electronic structure changes upon electronic excitation or ionization; particularly when such information is available for families of molecules. We give a description of the phenyl-ring-localized vibrational modes of the ground (So) electronic states of sets of meta-disubstituted benzene molecules including both symmetrically- and asymmetrically-substituted cases. As in our earlier work on monosubstituted benzenes (Gardner and Wright, 2011), para-disubstituted benzenes (Andrejeva et al., 2016), and ortho-disubstituted benzenes (Tuttle et al., 2018), we conclude that the use of the commonly-used Wilson or Varsanyi mode labels, which are based on the vibrational motions of benzene itself, is misleading and ambiguous. Instead, we label the phenyl-ring-localized modes consistently based upon the Mulliken (Herzberg) method for the modes of meta-difluorobenzene (mDFB) under C-s symmetry, since we wish the labelling scheme to cover both symmetrically- and asymmetrically-substituted molecules. By studying the vibrational wavenumbers obtained from the same force-field while varying the mass of the substituent, we are able to follow the evolving modes across a wide range of molecules and hence provide consistent assignments. We assign the vibrations of the following sets of molecules: the symmetric meta-dihalobenzenes, meta-xylene and resorcinol (meta-dihydroxybenzene); and the asymmetric meta-dihalobenzenes, meta-halotoluenes, meta-halophenols and meta-cresol. In the symmetrically substituted species, we find two pairs of in-phase and out-of-phase carbon-substituent stretches, and this motion persists in asymmetrically-substituted molecules for heavier substituents; however, when at least one of the substituents is light, then we find that these evolve into localized carbon-substituent stretches. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.