Point Group. Electronic Structure

Molecular Properties and Spectra 3.11.2.1 Point Group. Electronic Structure... 

We now turn to electronic selection rules for syimnetrical nonlinear molecules. The procedure here is to examme the structure of a molecule to detennine what synnnetry operations exist which will leave the molecular framework in an equivalent configuration. Then one looks at the various possible point groups to see what group would consist of those particular operations. The character table for that group will then pennit one to classify electronic states by symmetry and to work out the selection rules. Character tables for all relevant groups can be found in many books on spectroscopy or group theory. Ftere we will only pick one very sunple point group called 2 and look at some simple examples to illustrate the method. 

Examples of this degradation of bands are shown in Figures 7.44 and 7.45. Figure 7.44(a) shows the rotational fine structure of the Oj] band of the —X Ag system of 1,4-diffuorobenzene, belonging to the >2 point group. The fine structure is in the form of a contour of tens of thousands of unresolved rotational transitions which, nevertheless, shows well-defined features (B is an overlapping weaker band of a similar type). Since Biu = r(T ), as given by Table A.32 in Appendix A, the electronic transition is allowed and... 

For all but the few smallest clusters, the number of possible structures is virtually unlimited. In order to be able to treat the larger systems, quite restrictive assumptions about their geometry has to be made. For those clusters where well-defined equilibrium structures do exist, these are likely to possess a non-trivial point-group symmetry (in many cases the highest possible symmetry). It therefore seemed justified to focus the study on high-symmetric systems. Symmetry can also be used to simplify the calculation of electronic structure, and reduces the number of geometrical degrees of freedom to be optimized. 

With data averaged in point group m, the first refinements were carried out to estimate the atomic coordinates and anisotropic thermal motion parameters IP s. We have started with the atomic coordinates and equivalent isotropic thermal parameters of Joswig et al. [14] determined by neutron diffraction at room temperature. The high order X-ray data (0.9 < s < 1.28A-1) were used in this case in order not to alter these parameters by the valence electron density contributing to low order structure factors. Hydrogen atoms of the water molecules were refined isotropically with all data and the distance O-H were kept fixed at 0.95 A until the end of the multipolar refinement. The inspection of the residual Fourier maps has revealed anharmonic thermal motion features around the Ca2+ cation. Therefore, the coefficients up to order 6 of the Gram-Charlier expansion [15] were refined for the calcium cation in the scolecite. 

Consider the molecule AX3Y2, which has no unshared electron pairs on the central atom. Sketch the structures for all possible isomers of this compound and determine the point group to which each belongs. 

However, its was found possible to infer all four microscopic tensor coefficients from macroscopic crystalline values and this impossibility could be related to the molecular unit anisotropy. It can be shown that the molecular unit anisotropy imposes structural relations between coefficients of macroscopic nonlinearities, in addition to the usual relations resulting from crystal symmetry. Such additional relations appear for crystal point group 2,ra and 3. For the monoclinic point group 2, this relation has been tested in the case of MAP crystals, and excellent agreement has been found, triten taking into account crystal structure data (24), and nonlinear optical measurements on single crystal (19). This approach has been extended to the electrooptic tensor (4) and should lead to similar relations, trtten the electrooptic effect is primarily of electronic origin. 

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