Molecular structure, vibrational spectroscopy, NBO and HOMO, LUMO studies of o-methoxybenzonitrile

In the present study, the FT-IR and FT-Raman spectra of o-methoxybenzonitrile (O-MBN) have been recorded in the region 4000-400 cm(-1) and 3500-50 cm(-1), respectively. The fundamental modes of vibrational frequencies of O-MBN are assigned. Theoretical information on the optimized geometry, harmonic vibrational frequencies, infrared and Raman intensities were obtained by means of ab initio Hartree-Fock (HF) and density functional theory (DFT) gradient calculations with complete relaxation in the potential energy surface using 6-311++G(d,p) basis set. The vibrational frequencies which were determined experimentally from the spectral data are compared with those obtained theoretically from ab initio and DFT calculations. A close agreement was achieved between the observed and calculated frequencies by refinement of the scale factors. The infrared and Raman spectra were also predicted from the calculated intensities. Thermodynamic properties like entropy, heat capacity, zero point energy, have been calculated for the molecule. The predicted first hyperpolarizability also shows that the molecule might have a reasonably good non-linear optical (NLO) behavior. The calculated HOMO-LUMO energy gap reveals that charge transfer occurs within the molecule. Stability of the molecule arising from hyper conjugative interactions, charge delocalization have been analyzed using natural bond orbitals (NBO) analysis. Unambiguous vibrational assignment of all the fundamentals was made using the total energy distribution (TED).