Infrared spectrum of 4-methoxypicolinic acid N-oxide: computation of asymmetric O-H stretching band.

In this article we studied the strong intramolecularly hydrogen-bonded system 4-methoxypicolinic acid N-oxide. The potential energy surface V = V(rOH,rOO) and the corresponding dipole moment function were calculated using the DFT B3LYP/6-31+G(d,p) level of approximation. The time-independent vibrational Schrödinger equation was solved using a rectangular grid basis set and shifted Gaussian basis set. The vibrational spectrum and metric parameters were also calculated. Effects of deuteration were considered. The calculated vibrational spectra were compared with the experimental spectra. The vibrational transition corresponding to asymmetric O-H stretching that occurs at about 1400 cm-1 compares well with the experimentally assigned O-H asymmetric stretching band centered at 1380 cm-1. The corresponding asymmetric O-D stretching band was predicted to be at 1154 cm-1, while the experimental O-D band was not assigned due to its very low intensity. Several overtones and hot transitions of significant intensities were located in the vicinity of the fundamental O-H stretching frequency, effectively broadening the infrared absorption attributed to the O-H stretching mode. This is in a good agreement with the observed broad protonic absorptions found in the infrared spectra of the title compound and its analogs. We have shown that the Gaussian basis set is the method of choice for a two-dimensional vibrational problem that requires several hundreds of vibrational basis functions and when high accuracy of the eigenvalues is required or when extending the calculations to more vibrational degrees of freedom. We have also demonstrated that for a large number of basis functions the Gramm-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure outperforms symmetric and canonical orthogonalization schemes.