Structures, relative stability and dissociation of [Si,N,C,O]2+ isomers

Fifteen isomers of [Si,N,C,O]²⁺ system are obtained at UB3LYP/6-311G(d) and UCCSD(T)/6-311+G(2df) (single-point) levels. The analyses are made for predicting the structures of optimized isomers, while ionic fragments with lower energies are suggested. The calculated results indicate that linear isomer SiNCO²⁺(²Π) is thermodynamically the most stable species in [Si,N,C,O]²⁺ system, followed by linear SiOCN²⁺ (²Π), SiCNO²⁺ (²Π), and SiC(NO) (²A) with NCO three-membered ring. The order of stability of several kinetically stable isomers is SiNCO²> SiCNO²⁺ (²Π)>SiOCN²⁺>SiC(NO)²⁺>OSiNC²⁺ (²Π). The obtained results by analyzing the isomerizations and ionic fragment patterns show that the signal peaks of [Si,N,C,O]²⁺ are attributed to the contribution of linear SiNCO²⁺ species, which is metastable and can dissociate to the ionic fragments in the mass spectrometry experiments.