A recent reinvestigation of the structure of 2-oxazoline demonstrates the difficulties that many computational methods can still have in predicting structure.
Samdal, et al. report the careful examination of the microwave spectrum of 2-oxzoline and find that the molecule is puckered in the ground state.1 It’s not puckered by much, and the barrier for inversion of the pucker, through a planar transition state is only 49 ± 8 J mol-1. The lowest vibrational frequency in the non-planar ground state, which corresponds to the puckering vibration, has a frequency of 92 ± 15 cm-1. This low barrier is a great test case for quantum mechanical methodologies.
And the outcome here is not particularly good. HF/cc-pVQZ, M06-2X/cc-pVQZ, and B3LYP/cc-pVQZ all predict that 2-oxazoline is planar. More concerning is that CCSD and CCSD(T) with either the cc-pVTZ or cc-pVQZ basis sets also predict a planar structure. CCSD(T)-F12 with the cc-pVDZ predicts a non-planar ground state with a barrier of only 8.5 J mol-1, but this barrier shrinks to 5.5 J mol-1 with the larger cc-pVTZ basis set.
The only method that has good agreement with experiment is MP2. This method predicts a non-planar ground state with a pucker barrier of 11 J mol-1 with cc-pVTZ, 39.6 J mol-1 with cc-pVQZ, and 61 J mol-1 with the cc-pV5Z basis set. The non-planar ground state and the planar transition state of 2-oxazoline are shown in Figure 1. The computed puckering vibrational frequency does not reproduce the experiment as well; at MP2/cc-pV5Z the predicted frequency is 61 cm-1 which lies outside of the error range of the experimental value.
Non-planar |
Planar TS |
Figure 1. MP2/cc-pV5Z optimized geometry of the non-planar ground state and the planar transition
state of 2-oxazoline.
References
(1) Samdal, S.; Møllendal, H.; Reine, S.; Guillemin, J.-C. "Ring Planarity Problem of 2-Oxazoline Revisited Using Microwave Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemical Calculations," J. Phys. Chem. A 2015, 119, 4875–4884, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.5b02528.
InChIs
2-oxazoline: InChI=1S/C3H5NO/c1-2-5-3-4-1/h3H,1-2H2
InChIKey=IMSODMZESSGVBE-UHFFFAOYSA-N
Henry Rzepa responded on 17 Jun 2015 at 12:42 pm #
A few years back, if one reported results obtained using MP2, it was also imperative to show that the MP expansion was convergent, and not oscillating; thus MP3 and MP4. This is rarely done nowadays, but it makes one wonder! And was it not the same MP2 that Schleyer and co showed predicted aromatics such as benzene to be non-planar?