Proton transfer, hydrogen bonds experimental results

The first experimental data for a reaction involving proton transfer from a hydrogen-bonded acid to a series of bases which were chosen to give ApK-values each side of ApK=0 are given in Fig. 15 (Hibbert and Awwal, 1976, 1978 Hibbert, 1981). The results were obtained for proton transfer from 4-(3-nitrophenylazo)salicylate ion to a series of tertiary aliphatic amines in aqueous solution, as in (64) with R = 3-nitrophenylazo. Kinetic measurements were made using the temperature-jump technique with spectrophoto-metric detection to follow reactions with half-lives down to 5 x 10"6s. The reciprocal relaxation time (t ), which is the time constant of the exponential... 

The effect of the solvent is usually modelled either by the use of the Onsager s self consistent reaction field (SCRF) [20] or by the polarizable continuum method (PCM) [21]. With regard to the relative stability of cytosine tautomers in aqueous solution, these methods provided results [14,15] which, in spite of some discrepancies, are in reasonable agreement with experimental data [3]. However, continuum-based methods do not explicitly take into consideration the local solvent-solute interaction which is instead important in the description of the proton transfer mechanism in hydrogen-bonded systems. A reasonable approach to the problem was recently proposed [22,23] in which the molecule of interest and few solvent molecules are treated as a supermolecule acting as solute, while the bulk of the solvent is represented as a polarizable dielectric. 

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