Potential scans and potential energy distributions of normal vibrational modes of trichloroacetyl isocyanate

The conformational stability and vibrational infrared and Raman spectra of trichloroacetyl isocyanate (CCl₃CONCO) were investigated by ab initio MP2 and density functional B3LYP calculations using the 6-311++G** basis set. From the potential energy scans of the internal rotations in both the halomethyl and the isocyanate rotors, the molecule was predicted to exist predominantly in the cis-cis conformation. The steric hindrance between the halomethyl group and the nitrogen lone-pair was found to favor the staggered configuration for the chlorine atom, while conjugation effects favor the planar configuration for the C=O and the NCO groups. Vibrational wavenumbers were computed for the molecule at the DFT-B3LYP/6-311++G** level. Normal coordinate calculations were carried out to obtain the potential energy distributions (PED) among the symmetry coordinates of the normal modes for the molecule. The theoretical vibrational assignments were compared with experimental ones and ratios of observed to calculated wavenumbers of about 0.97-1.04 were obtained.