O-H···S hydrogen bonds conform to the acid-base formalism

Hydrogen bonding interaction between the ROH hydrogen bond donor and sulfur atom as an acceptor has not been as well characterized as the O-H···O interaction. The strength of O-H···O interactions for a given donor has been well documented to scale linearly with the proton affinity (PA) of the H-bond acceptor. In this regard, O-H···O interactions conform to the acid-base formalism. The importance of such correlation is to be able to estimate molecular property of the complex from the known thermodynamic data of its constituents. In this work, we investigate the properties of O-H···S interaction in the complexes of the H-bond donor and sulfur containing acceptors of varying proton affinity. The hydrogen bonded complexes of p-Fluorophenol (FP) with four different sulfur containing acceptors and their oxygen analogues, namely H2O/H2S, MeOH/MeSH, Me2O/Me2S and tetrahydrofuran (THF)/tetrahydrothiophene (THT) were characterized in regard to its S1-S0 excitation spectra and the IR spectra. Two-color resonantly enhanced multiphoton ionization (2c-R2PI), resonant ion-dip infrared (RIDIR) spectroscopy, and IR-UV hole burning spectroscopic techniques were used to probe the hydrogen bonds in the aforementioned complexes. The spectroscopic data along with the ab initio calculations were used to deduce the strength of the O-H···S hydrogen bonding interactions in these system relative to that in the O-H···O interactions. It was found that, despite being dominated by the dispersion interaction, the O-H···S interactions conform to the acid-base formalism as in the case of more conventional O-H···O interactions. The dissociation energies and the red shifts in the O-H stretching frequencies correlated very well with the proton affinity of the acceptors. However, the O-H···S interaction did not follow the same correlation as that in the O-H···O H-bond. The energy decomposition analysis showed that the dissociation energies and the red shifts in the O-H stretching frequencies follow a unified correlation if these two parameters were correlated with the sum of the charge transfer and the exchange component of the total binding energy.