Structure enhancement methodology using theory and experiment: gas-phase molecular structures using a dynamic interaction between electron diffraction, molecular mechanics, and ab initio data.

A new method of incorporating ab initio theoretical data dynamically into the gas-phase electron diffraction (GED) refinement process has been developed to aid the structure determination of large, sterically crowded molecules. This process involves calculating a set of differences between parameters that define the positions of peripheral atoms (usually hydrogen), as determined using molecular mechanics (MM), and those which use ab initio methods. The peripheral-atom positions are then updated continually during the GED refinement process, using MM, and the returned positions are modified using this set of differences to account for the differences between ab initio and MM methods, before being scaled back to the average parameters used to define them, as refined from experimental data. This allows the molecule to adopt a completely asymmetric structure if required, without being constrained by the MM parametrization, whereas the calculations can be performed on a practical time scale. The molecular structures of tri-tert-butylphosphine oxide and tri-tert-butylphosphine imide have been re-examined using this new technique, which we call SEMTEX (Structure Enhancement Methodology using Theory and EXperiment).