15min:

TYLER P. TROY, SCOTT H. KABLE, TIMOTHY W. SCHMIDT, School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; SCOTT A. REID, Department of Chemistry, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53233.

Recent attention has been directed on closed shell aromatic cations as potential carriers of the diffuse interstellar bands. The spectra of mass-selected, matrix-isolated benzylium and tropylium cations were recently reported [Nagy, A., Fulara, J., Garkusha, I. and Maier, J. P. (2011), Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. , 50: 3022-3025]. The benzylium spectrum shows an extended progression in a low frequency (510 cm^-1) ring distortion mode. Modeling of the benzylium spectrum using (TD)DFT and MCSCF-PT2 methods in concert with multidimensional Franck-Condon (FC) analysis is found to yield excellent agreement with the experimental spectrum. We extended this analysis to larger (2 and 3 ring) PAH cations derived from resonance stabilized radicals, which are predicted to show strong S₀ S_n transitions in the visible region. The FC progression is significantly quenched in the larger species, and our results for 1-napthylmethylium are in excellent agreement with very recent experiments [Nagy, A., Fulara, J., and Maier, J. P. (2011), J. Am. Chem. Soc. , 133, 19796]. Since carriers of the DIBs should exhibit spectra dominated by a single vibronic transition, our results demonstrate that closed-shell cations may present spectra with the required properties. Furthermore, the calculated ionization energies of a range of CSCs were found to be in the 13-14 eV range, consistent with variations in behaviour of the DIB carriers with respect to various astrophysical environments.