The Electronic Structure of Some Cyanohydrins—A Spectroscopically Under‐Investigated Family of Compounds |
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| Authors: | Prof. Dr. Anna Chrostowska Dr. Clovis Darrigan Prof. Dr. Alain Dargelos Dr. Abdessamad Benidar Dr. Jean‐Claude Guillemin |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, CNRS, UMR 5254-IPREM-Institut des Sciences Analytiques et de Physico-Chimie pour l'Environnement et les Matériaux, Pau, France;2. Institut de Physique de Rennes, UMR 6251 CNRS Université de Rennes 1, Rennes Cedex, France;3. Institut des Sciences Chimiques de Rennes, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Rennes, CNRS, UMR 6226, Rennes Cedex 7, France |
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| Abstract: | Cyanohydrins are usually formed by addition of hydrogen cyanide to aldehydes or ketones while the elimination of HCN from cyanohydrins is easily observed upon heating. The low thermal stability of these highly boiling compounds leads to difficult studies in the gas phase where partial or complete decomposition is usually observed. Consequently, the reported physicochemical properties of such compounds in the gas phase are still scarce. Keeping with this, four simple cyanohydrins, the glycolonitrile and methyl, vinyl and ethynyl derivatives, have been selected. These are possible candidates for the Interstellar Medium, where the corresponding aldehydes and HCN have been detected, and could have played an important role in prebiotic chemistry, as already proposed for some of them. Three well‐suited spectroscopic techniques, namely, UV photoelectron, infrared, and Raman spectroscopies, in tandem with quantum calculations, have been chosen for the structure analysis. Photoelectron spectroscopy, successfully performed with gaseous compounds, provides the first comparative study on cyanohydrins in the gas phase. |
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| Keywords: | ab initio calculations cyanohydrins IR spectroscopy photoelectron spectroscopy Raman spectroscopy |
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