Rh
2
O
n
+
(
n
= 2–10) species are
prepared by the reaction of
the laser-ablated rhodium atoms with oxygen; furthermore, they are
characterized by employing time-of-flight mass spectroscopy. To reveal
the stable electronic structure, in this study, we performed the density
functional theory calculations for the possible isomers of Rh
2
O
7
+
. A total of 29 geometries were obtained
including cyclic Rh
2
O
3
, cyclic Rh
2
O
2
, and ring-opening structures with doublet, quartet,
sextet, and octet states. It is noteworthy that no Rh–Rh bond
was observed for all the optimized Rh
2
O
7
+
isomers including oxides, peroxides, superoxides, and oxygen
groups. The optimized geometries were also confirmed to exhibit minimum
structural energies by employing harmonic frequency analysis at the
same energy level. Generally, two types of oxygen-bridged geometries
were discovered with cyclic and pseudo-linear Rh
2
O
7
+
, which contained one or more than one O
2
groups. It is concluded that the cyclic structure comprises a lower
energy than that observed in pseudo-linear structures. In addition,
Rh
2
O
7
+
tends to be unstable when
the coordination groups change from O
2
to O
2
–
unit. Finally, the localized orbital bonding
analysis indicates that Rh has oxidation states of 1 or 2 in cyclic
Rh
2
O
7
+
structures; this is true even
in the presence of O
2–
, O
2
–
, and O
2
2–
groups.