Thiophenol and thiophenol radical and their complexes with gold clusters Au5 and Au6

The longstanding controversy between experiment and theory regarding which conformer of thiophenol, planar or perpendicular, is the most stable and what is the magnitude of the corresponding rotational barrier of the S–H group is discussed. We propose a variety of rather modest high-level computational methods within the density theory, which corroborate the experimental data. These methods demonstrate that the planar structure of thiophenol is the most stable and the magnitude of the rotational barrier falls within the experimental range of 3.35±0.84 kJ mol⁻¹. However, the barrier is of the order of RT at room temperature, which might prevent to clearly identify the most stable conformer of thiophenol in experiments and leads to a large-amplitude motion of the thiolic hydrogen. On the other hand, such low value of the barrier may lead to some error in evaluating the thermodynamic properties of thiophenol within the rigid-rotor-harmonic oscillator model, in particular for the bond dissociation enthalpy. We also show the existence of a large entropy contribution to the Gibbs free energy difference between the planar and perpendicular conformers which is the order of the rotational barrier (≈4 kJ mol⁻¹). This might be of interest for experimental study. The most stable complexes of thiophenol with the gold clusters Au₅ and Au₆ are also investigated. It is shown that the sulfur atom prefers to anchor to two- and three-coordinated atoms of gold in these clusters to form a strongly directional gold–sulfur bond. The hydrogen abstraction from the S–H group of thiophenol bonded to the two-coordinated gold atom in Au₅ yields the bridging Au–S dibond and results in a spectacular reduction of the bond dissociation energy of thiophenol by nearly a factor of three.