title: Rozen's epoxidation reagent, CH3CN.HOF: a theoretical study of its structure, vibrational spectroscopy, and reaction mechanism.
abstract: Rozen's epoxidation reagent, CH(3)CN.HOF, and a prototype epoxidation reaction employing it, have been subjected to an extensive ab initio and density functional study. Its anharmonic force field reveals a very strong red shift for the OH stretch and a strong blue shift for the HOF bend, in semiquantitative agreement with experiment. The very strong hydrogen bond (8.20 kcal/mol at the W1 level) not only serves to stabilize the reactant but also considerably lowers the barrier height for epoxidation of ethylene. Moreover, the reaction byproduct HF is found to act autocatalytically. The OH moiety acquires HO(+) character in the transition state. Our W1 benchmark data for the reaction profile allow the performance of various DFT functionals to be assessed. In general, "kinetics" functionals overestimate barrier heights, the BMK functional less so than the others. The B1B95 and TPSS33B95 meta-GGA functionals both perform very well, whereas general-purpose hybrid GGAs underestimate barrier heights. The simple PBE0 functional does reasonably well.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Organic Chemistry and Structural Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, IL-76100 Rehovot, Israel.
authors.forename: Rotem
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sertchook
authors.forename: A Daniel
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Boese
authors.forename: Jan M L
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Martin
mesh_terms: D000097:Acetonitriles / Q000737:chemistry; D004852:Epoxy Compounds / Q000737:chemistry; D006801:Humans; D006860:Hydrogen Bonding; D007700:Kinetics; D008956:Models, Chemical; D015394:Molecular Structure; D013057:Spectrum Analysis
chemical_list: D000097:Acetonitriles; D004852:Epoxy Compounds