This thesis was directed at learning more about the unusual electronic environment near hydrogen within strong hydrogen bonds. "Strong" hydrogen bonds are unique in that the hydrogen atom is symmetrically located, or nearly so, between two electronegative atoms; the bond energies are relatively large. In a "normal" hydrogen bond the hydrogen atom is bonded to, and thus physically closer to, a parent atom, and only weakly attracted to another electronegative atom; bond energies are typically small. To examine these bonds, deuterium was substituted for hydrogen and the electric quadrupole coupling constant (QCC) of deuterium was measured using field cycling nuclear magnetic resonance. The electric quadrupole moment of deuterium is sensitive to changes in the surrounding electric field gradient, and is thus a good probe of the immediate electronic structure. The results show that the temperature dependence of the QCC is opposite to, and much larger than, what one would normally expect to observe for deuterium. The QCC is found to decrease strongly with decreasing temperature. This project was the first to study in detail the temperature dependence of deuterium QCCs in strong hydrogen bonds. The magnitude of the deuterium QCCs for the diacetates was found to be strongly depressed relative to typical values for deuterium. These results parallel large shifts in the infrared vibrational frequencies observed in many molecules which contain strong hydrogen bonds. The asymmetry parameter, which is a measure of the departure from axial symmetry of the electric field gradient (EFG) at deuterium, was found to be unusually large for what are known to be linear, or nearly linear, three-center bonds. Based on ab initio Hartree-Fock calculations aimed at determining the EFG at H in the archetypal bifluoride ion, F-H-F$\sp-$, the electronic charge density is drastically depleted at H. It is believed that the large reduction in the charge density allows the deuterium EFG to be highly sensitive to the shape of the charge distribution on the atoms to which deuterium is bonded. If these atoms are at points of low crystallographic symmetry, the polarization of these adjacent atoms by other nearby atoms may cause the EFG to depart substantially from being axially symmetric. Also obtained from the molecular orbital calculations for bifluoride ion were the total electronic energy and the electric field gradient at H. From these calculations potential function models for the asymmetric stretch and the bend were constructed. An attempt was made to correlate the predictions made by these models for the temperature dependence of the deuteron quadrupole coupling constant in bifluoride ion with the experimentally observed results for the diacetates.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8889 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | Shaw, Eric Max |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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