The study of the existence of unknown and unstable compounds through mixed crystal formation using radioactive tracers

A heterogeneous distribution study with internally formed lead chromate as host and¹¹⁰Ag as guest indicates the existence of a new variety of lead chromate, which forms mixed crystals with silver chromate, and differs in morphology from the aged variety. It is inferred that the formation of mixed crystals is probably due to breeding of a morphologically analogous and unstable species by the guest component. By means of study of the homogeneous distribution coefficient, D, of the system consisting of KFe(SO₄)₂·12H₂O as host and¹¹⁰Ag as guest, the existence of an unknown alum, AgFe(SO₄)₂·12H₂O, in trace amounts has been demonstrated. A distribution study of the system shows that KFe(SO₄)₂·12H₂O forms mixed crystals with¹¹⁰Ag up to 10°C, after which the uptake follows an adsorption pattern. The transition temperature of the guest alum, indicated by a sharp change in the D values, is found to be 10°C. Application of radioactive tracers in the study of new and unstable compounds have been stressed.     

Rotamerisation and intramolecular proton transfer of 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)oxazole, 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)imidazole and 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)thiazole: a theoretical study

Semi-empirical (AM1-SCI) calculations have been performed on 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)oxazole (HPO), 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)imidazole (HPI) and 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)thiazole (HPT) to rationalise the photophysical behaviour of the compounds exhibiting intramolecular rotation as well as excited state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT). The calculations reveal that there is a gradual variation in the properties from HPO to HPT through HPI so far as the existence of the rotational isomers in the ground state is concerned. While HPO gives rise to two stable rotamers (I and II) in all the common solvents, there is only one stable species for HPT in the S₀ state. For HPI, rotamer II is possible only in the isolated state and/or in solvents of low polarity, but in high polar solvents it gives rise to the normal form (I) only. For all the molecules in the series, however, intramolecular proton transfer (IPT) takes place in the lowest excited singlet (S₁) and the triplet (T₁) states. Combination of the rotamerism and ESIPT gives rise to multiple fluorescence bands for the fluorophores. Theoretical assignments have been made for the excitation, fluorescence and phosphorescence bands. Simulated potential energy curves (PEC) in different electronic states reveal that the IPT process is feasible in either of the S₁ and T₁ states but not in the ground state. The ESIPT reaction has been found to be favoured both thermodynamically and kinetically in these electronic states compared to the ground state. However, quantum mechanical tunnelling has been proposed for the prototropic reaction to proceed in the excited states.     

Towards the Development and Applications of Manifestly Spin-free Multi-reference Coupled Electron-pair Approximation-like Methods: A State Specific Approach

As a practical tool of being applicable to bigger molecules, a full-blown state-specific multi-reference coupled cluster formalism developed by us (Mahapatra et al. in J Chem Phys 110:6171, 1999) would be rather demanding computationally, and it is worthwhile to look for physically motivated approximation schemes which capture a substantial portion of the correlation of the full-blown theory. In this spirit, we have recently proposed coupled electron-pair approximation (CEPA)-like various approximants to the parent spin-adapted state-specific multi-reference coupled cluster (SS-MRCC) theory which depend on the inclusion of EPV terms to various degree. Here, the space of excitations is confined to the first order interactive virtual space generated by the cluster operator, but the EPV terms are included exactly. We call them spin-free state specific multi-reference CERA (SS-MRCEPA) theories. They work within the complete active space (CAS) and have been found to be very effective in bypassing the intruders, similar in performance to that of the parent SS-MRCC theory. The spin-adaptation of the working equations of both the SS-MRCC and the CEPA-like approximants is a non-trivial exercise. In this paper, we delineate briefly the essentials of a spin-free formulation of the SS-MRCC and SS-MRCEPA theories. This allows us to include open-shell configuration state functions (CSF) in the CAS. We consider three variants of SS-MRCEPA method. Two are explicitly orbital invariant: (1) SS-MRCEPA(0), a purely lineralized version of the SS-MRCC theory, (2) SS-MRCEPA(I), which includes all the EPV terms explicitly and exactly in an orbital invariant manner and (3) the SS-MRCEPA(D), which emerges when we keep only the diagonal terms of a set of dressed operators in the working equations. Unlike the first two, the third version is not invariant under the orbital transformation within the set of doubly occupied core, valence and virtual orbitals. The SS-MRCEPA methods produce very encouraging results as was evidenced in the applications on the computation of potential energy surfaces for the ground states of LiH and HF molecules.     

Estimation of rare and radioactive constitutents in samples of Indian tobacco with the aid of low-level beta-counter

The extraction of radium and barium into a mixture of 1-phenyl-3-methyl-4-benzoylpyrazol-5-one (HPy) and trioctylphosphine oxide (TOPO) in n-hexane or cyclohexane was investigated as a function of pH and TOPO concentration. It was found that the synergistic enhancement of the extraction is caused by the formation of mixed complexes of type M(Py)₂ (TOPO)₃ and the overall extraction constants of both complexes were calculated.     

Assessment of Two Surface Monte Carlo (TSMC) method to find stationary points of (H2O)15 and (H2O)20 clusters

The Two Surface Monte Carlo (TSMC) technique reduces computational cost by using a computationally cheap biasing potential, which guides the molecular system to explore the potential energy surface of interest. It was shown earlier that the Effective Fragment Potential (EFP) can be a good choice for this biasing potential (Bandyopadhyay, J Chem Phys 122:091102, 2005) when the potential energy surface of interest is quantum mechanical. This may help in expanding the applicability of TSMC, since finding a good biasing potential is a major challenge. In the present work, the viability of TSMC method in finding stationary points of large molecular system is investigated using EFP as the biasing potential and RHF theory as the potential of interest. TSMC is applied to find the stationary points of water clusters of size 15 and 20. A semi-automated method starting from random geometries, without using any chemical intuition, found several stationary points. The simulated annealing method was used to refine the structures obtained from TSMC. Among the several low-energy structures obtained for 15 water cluster, one minimum, about 1 kcal/mol higher than the global minimum, was found. However, for 20 water cluster, no structure very close to the global minimum was obtained. Several strategies, learned from the experience of the present work, are discussed for improving the TSMC method, including the acceptance between the two energy surfaces. Contribution to the Mark S. Gordon 65th Birthday Festschrift Issue.     

Solvatochromic study of three indoloquinoline derivatives: Effect of chloro group/s on the photophysics of thecompounds

Photophysical modulations of three indoloquinoline derivatives, viz., 5-Methyl-5H-indolo[3,2-c]quinoline (MIQ), 8-Chloro-5-methyl-5H-indolo[3,2-c]quinoline (CMIQ), and 2,8-Dichloro-5-methyl-5H-indolo[3,2-c]quinoline (DCMIQ) have been studied. These compounds belong to the cryptosanguinolentine family and are known to have potential anti-cancer abilities. In the present work we studied the effect of solvent polarity on introduction of one or two chloro (-Cl) group/s at chosen sites on the parent cryptosanguinolentine. The compounds exist mainly in two forms, neutral and zwitterionic, in equilibrium at ground state. Interestingly, all the three compounds exhibit hypsochromic shift in their absorption and fluorescence spectra with increase in relative permittivity of solvents in most of the cases. Blue-shift in fluoroscence might be due to lesser dipole moment of the species in the excited state. Time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy clearly indicates the presence of two species in all the solvents in the excited state (except MIQ in water). The shift in the molecular polarity with chloro substitution/s seems to be responsible for the contributions of the two species in the excited state. The relative contributions are found to alter remarkably in a regular manner when MIQ is compared with CMIQ and DCMIQ. This behavior is supposed to be mainly due to dipole-dipole interaction between the solvent molecules and the fluorophores.     

Efficient synthesis of 2,6,9-triazabicyclo[3.3.1]nonanes through amine-mediated formal [4+4] reaction of unsaturated imines

Formal [4+4] reaction of the unsaturated benzyl- or allylimines, which is efficiently mediated by primary amine, provides the 2,6,9-triazabicyclo[3.3.1]nonane derivatives. Variously substituted homo- and hetero-coupling products are obtained in good to excellent yields by quite a simple procedure under mild conditions: by mixing the unsaturated aldehydes with the amines at room temperature.     

Almost constrained subspaces of Banach spaces

In this paper, we obtain some sufficient conditions for an almost constrained subspace to be constrained (in fact, by a unique norm 1 projection), which improves significantly upon all existing conditions of similar type with significantly simpler proofs.

     

Monte Carlo temperature basin paving with effective fragment potential: an efficient and fast method for finding low-energy structures of water clusters (H2O)20 and (H2O)25

Determining low-energy structures of large water clusters is a challenge for any optimization algorithm. In this work, we have developed a new Monte Carlo (MC)-based method, temperature basin paving (TBP), which is related to the well-known basin hopping method. In the TBP method, the Boltzmann weight factor used in MC methods is dynamically modified based on the history of the simulation. The states that are visited more are given a lower probability by increasing their temperatures and vice versa. This allows faster escapes from the states frequently visited in the simulation. We have used the TBP method to find a large number of low-energy minima of water clusters of size 20 and 25. We have found structures energetically same to the global minimum structures known for these two clusters. We have compared the efficiency of this method to the basin-hopping method and found that it can locate the minima faster. Statistical efficiency of the new method has been investigated by running a large number of trajectories. The new method can locate low-energy structures of both the clusters faster than some of the reported algorithms for water clusters and can switch between high energy and low-energy structures multiple times in a simulation illustrating its efficiency. The large number of minima obtained from the simulations is used to get both general and specific features of the minima. The distribution of minima for these two clusters based on the similarity of their oxygen frames shows that the (H(2)O)(20) can have different variety of structures, but for (H(2)O)(25), low-energy structures are mostly cagelike. Several (H(2)O)(25) structures are found with similar energy but with different cage architectures. Noncage structures of (H(2)O)(25) are also found but they are 6-7 kcal/mol higher in energy from the global minimum. The TBP method is likely to play an important role for exploring the complex energy landscape of large molecules.     

Interaction of a "nido"-ruthenium terpyridylamine complex with charged elongated micellar scaffolds

Influence on ionic surfactants by a specially designed terpyridylamine ligand and the ruthenium(II) complex formed with it has been studied in aqueous solution. The ligand coordinates to Ru(2+) into an octahedral geometry in such a way that the final form takes a "nido" or nest-like structure. The substitution on the pyridinyl moiety is kept at the ortho position to acquire the specified geometry. Similar complexes have been reported to have anti-tumor properties and thus the ruthenium complexes can effectively replace platinum complexes that serve the same purpose but with certain drawbacks. The "nido" geometry was chosen to minimize the cytotoxicity that creeps in when para substituents of the pyridinyl moiety are used. The latter variety forms a dendridic scaffold. In presence of both the ligand and the complex, ionic surfactants form elongated aggregates. The surface charge of those aggregates decides the nature of interaction of the ligand and the complex formed therefore. Interaction with anionic surfactant scaffold is found to be stronger than the cationic one.