On large amplitude motions of simplest amides in the ground and excited electronic states

Abstract

For the formamide, acetamide, N-methylformamide and N-methylacetamide molecules in the ground (S0) and lowest excited singlet (S1) and triplet (T1) electronic states equilibrium geometry parameters, harmonic vibrational frequencies, barriers to conformational transitions and conformer energy differences were estimated by means of MP2, CCSD(T), CASSCF, CASPT2 and MRCI ab initio methods. One-, two- and three-dimensional potential energy surface (PES) sections corresponding to different large amplitude motions (LAM) were calculated by means of MP2/aug-cc-pVTZ (S0) and CASPT2/cc-pVTZ (S1,T1). For these molecules, in each excited electronic state six minima were found on 2D PES sections. Using PES sections, different anharmonic vibrational problems were solved and the frequencies of large amplitude vibrations were determined.