The application of a new reaction scheme using CH2I + O2 to generate the simplest Criegee intermediate, CH2OO, has stimulated lively research; the Criegee intermediates are extremely important in atmospheric chemistry. The detailed mechanism of CH2I + O2 is hence important in understanding kinetics involving CH2OO. We employed ultraviolet absorption to probe simultaneously CH2I2, CH2OO, CH2I, and IO in the reaction system of CH2I + O2 upon photolysis at 248 nm of a flowing mixture of CH2I2, O2, and N2 (or SF6) in the pressure range 7.6-779 Torr to investigate the reaction kinetics. With a detailed mechanism to model the observed temporal profiles of CH2I, CH2OO, and IO, we found that various channels of the reaction CH2I + O2 and CH2OO + I play important roles; an additional decomposition channel of CH2I + O2 to form products other than CH2OO or ICH2OO becomes important at pressure less than 60 Torr. The pressure dependence of the derived rate coefficients of various channels of reactions of CH2I + O2 and CH2OO + I has been determined. We derived a rate coefficient also for the self-reaction of CH2OO as k = (8 ± 4) × 10(-11) cm(3) molecule(-1) s(-1) at 295 K. The yield of CH2OO from CH2I + O2 was found to have a pressure dependence on N2 and O2 smaller than in previous reports; for air under 1 atm, the yield of ~30% is about twice of previous estimates.

The OH bond of methanol, ethanol and t-butyl alcohol becomes more anharmonic upon hydrogen bonding and the infrared intensity ratio between the overtone and the fundamental transition of the bridging OH stretching mode decreases drastically. FTIR spectroscopy of supersonic slit jet expansions allows to quantify these effects for isolated alcohol dimers, enabling a direct comparison to anharmonic vibrational predictions. The diagonal anharmonicity increase amounts to 15-18%, growing with increasing alkyl substitution. The overtone/fundamental IR intensity ratio, which is on the order of 0.1 or more for isolated alcohols, drops to 0.004-0.001 in the hydrogen-bonded OH group, making overtone detection very challenging. Again, alkyl substitution enhances the intensity suppression. Vibrational second order perturbation theory appears to capture these effects in a semiquantitative way. Harmonic quantum chemistry predictions for the hydrogen bond-induced OH stretching frequency shift (the widely used infrared signature of hydrogen bonding) are insufficient, and diagonal anharmonicity corrections from experiment make the agreement between theory and experiment worse. Inclusion of anharmonic cross terms between hydrogen bond modes and the OH stretching mode is thus essential, as is a high level electronic structure theory. The isolated molecule results are compared to matrix isolation data, complementing earlier studies in N2 and Ar by the more weakly interacting Ne and p-H2 matrices. Matrix effects on the hydrogen bond donor vibration are quantified.

The quantum solid para-hydrogen (p-H2) has emerged as a new host for matrix isolation experiments. Among several unique characteristics, the diminished cage effect enables the possibility of producing free radicals via either photolysis in situ or bimolecular reactions of molecules with atoms or free radicals that are produced in situ from their precursors upon photo-irradiation. Many free radicals that are unlikely to be produced in noble-gas matrices can be produced readily in solid p-H2. In addition, protonated species can be produced upon electron bombardment of p-H2 containing a small proportion of the precursor during deposition. The application of this novel technique to generate protonated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and their neutral counterparts demonstrates its superiority over other methods. The technique of using p-H2 as a matrix host has opened up many possibilities for the preparation of free radicals and unstable species and their spectral characterization. Many new areas of applications and fundamental understanding concerning the p-H2 matrix await further exploration.

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