[Study on the Temperature Dependent Phase Transformation of Raman Spectra for Cyclobutanol]

Cyclobutanol (C₄H₈O) is one of the four-membered ring type molecules, which usually adopts a non-planar equilibrium conformation, and the substituent group OH can adopt two positions relative to the puckered ring, the axial or the equatorial, giving rise to an additional degree of freedom and various molecular conformations. Additionally, temperature is one important thermodynamic parameter that greatly influents the structure and induces the possibility of conformational change or crystal change. As a consequence, there may be a number of phase transitions and molecular conformations for cyclobutanol under different temperature. In this paper, Raman and infrared spectroscopic technique were applied to investigate the vibration modes of cyclobutanol. The results indicate that the main component of the liquid cyclobutanol is equatorial-trans (Eq-t) conformer with a few Eq-g conformers at ambient condition. Then differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and low temperature Raman spectroscopic were applied to study the phase transition of cyclobutanol during the cooling and heating process. It is observed that the Raman spectra and the intensities of these bands are not significantly changed during the cooling process. The results indicate that there is sill no presence of solidification especially cooling to 140K, which indicates that the cyclobutanol still remains the liquid state and supercooled state is observed during the cooling process. And this supercooled liquid is one metastable state, not in thermodynamic equilibrium. Further cooling to 138 K, the super-cooling liquid cyclobutanol will transform into the glassy state, accompanied with a small change of entropy. During the heating process, as the temperature is raised to 180 K, the Raman peaks became sharper and some new characteristic peaks appeared abruptly and a discontinuous change was observed in bandwidths versus temperature. And these new signatures can be maintained upon to 220 K, and then will disappear as the temperature increasing continuously. This result indicates the one crystal phase transition and a melting transition present at around 180 and 220 K. In addition, it can be observed that the component of Eq-g conformer increases, accompanied with the crystallization during heating at around 180 K. These results were helpful to understand the kinetics of the crystallization process of other small organic molecules.