Dissociation Energies of Sulfur-Centered Hydrogen-Bonded Complexes

In this work we have determined dissociation energies of O–H···S hydrogen bond in the H₂S complexes of various phenol derivatives using 2-color-2-photon photofragmentation spectroscopy in combination with zero kinetic energy photoelectron (ZEKE-PE) spectroscopy. This is the first report of direct determination of dissociation energy of O–H···S hydrogen bond. The ZEKE-PE spectra of the complexes revealed a long progression in the intermolecular stretching mode with significant anharmonicity. Using the anharmonicity information and experimentally determined dissociation energy, we also validated Birge–Sponer (B-S) extrapolation method, which is an approximate method to estimate dissociation energy. Experimentally determined dissociation energies were compared with a variety of ab initio calculations. One of the important findings is that ωB97X-D functional, which is a dispersion corrected DFT functional, was able to predict the dissociation energies in both the cationic as well as the ground electronic state very well for almost every case.