Hydrogen bonds alcohol clusters

After raising a selection of topical issues in this field and briefly introducing some spectroscopic and numerical techniques to probe the hydrogen bond dynamics, recent results for alcohol clusters are presented in order of increasing complexity. They are followed by some general conclusions and an outlook on future research goals. 

Among the wealth of issues relevant to hydrogen bonding in alcohol clusters, this review will focus on aspects related to hydrogen bond patterns and on the dynamical implications over a wide range of time scales. Some key questions connected to these aspects will be formulated. 

Figure 1. Illustration of lone electron pair preferences in alcohol dimers, cooperative and anticooperative binding sites for a third monomer, ring strain and steric repulsion in alcohol trimers, alternation of residues in alcohol tetramers, and chain, branch, and cyclic hydrogen bond topologies in larger clusters.

Figure 3. Librational OH modes in hydrogen bonded alcohol clusters may be correlated with overall rotation (bottom left) and torsion (top left) of the monomer (illustrated for methanol), but methyl rotation is actually decoupled from OH torsion by hydrogen bonding. Note that the wavenumbers of monomer rotation (fa 4 cm-1) and torsion (fa 280 cm-1) are much lower than that of the cluster libration (fa 600cm ) [93].

Microwave spectroscopy is probably the ultimate tool to study small alcohol clusters in vacuum isolation. With the help of isotope substitution and auxiliary quantum chemical calculations, it provides structural insights and quantitative bond parameters for alcohol clusters [117, 143], The methyl rotors that are omnipresent in organic alcohols complicate the analysis, so that not many alcohol clusters have been studied with this technique and its higher-frequency variants. The studied systems include methanol dimer [143], ethanol dimer [91], butan-2-ol dimer [117], and mixed dimers such as propylene oxide with ethanol [144]. The study of alcohol monomers with intramolecular hydrogen-bond-like interactions [102, 110, 129, 145 147] must be mentioned in this context. In a broader sense, this also applies to isolated ra-alkanols, where a weak Cy H O hydrogen bond stabilizes certain conformations [69,102]. Microwave techniques can also be used to unravel the information contained in the IR spectrum of clusters with high sensitivity [148], Furthermore, high-resolution UV spectroscopy can provide accurate structural information in suitable systems [149, 150] and thus complement microwave spectroscopy. 

Once the alcohol or at least the cluster contains a soft ionization or fluorescence chromophore, a wide range of experimental tools opens up. Experimental methods for hydrogen-bonded aromatic clusters have been reviewed before [3, 19, 175]. Fluorescence can sometimes behave erratically with cluster size [176], and short lifetimes may require ultrafast detection techniques [177]. However, the techniques are very powerful and versatile in the study of alcohol clusters. Aromatic homologs of ethanol and propanol have been studied in this way [35, 120, 121, 178, 179]. By comparison to the corresponding nonaromatic systems [69], the O—H - n interaction can be unraveled and contrasted to that of O—H F contacts [30]. Attachment of nonfunctional aromatic molecules to nonaromatic alcohols and their clusters can induce characteristic switches in hydrogen bond topology [180], like aromatic side chains [36]. Nevertheless, it is a powerful tool for the size-selected study of alcohol clusters. 

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