Disilene,silylsilylene and their cations

An accurate examination of features of the ground state surfaces of Si₂H₄ and Si₂H ₄ ⁺ is reported; they are compared to C₂H₄ and C₂H ₄ ⁺ . For the neutral species, accurate SCF calculations show disilene to be planar, but silylsilylene has the lower energy, whereas at the correlated (CI, MP2, MP3, MP4(SD)) levels disilene becomes trans bent and has the lower energy by 6 kcal/mol. In view of a recent theoretical suggestion that this value should be 23 kcal/mol, we have used large basis sets in these investigations. Our calculations cannot support this large value. Similar investigations are reported for the cation, where the planar disilene structure is predicted to be the most stable. It may be very slightly twisted at high accuracy CI, but it is much lower in energy than the silylsilylene structure. Vibrational frequencies and infra-red intensities are also reported. Theoretical photoelectron spectra of C and Si systems are presented and compared with experiment.