Low Frequency Vibrational Modes of Room Temperature Ionic Liquids

SS Sarangi and SK Reddy and S Balasubramanian, JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY B, 115, 1874-1880 (2011).

DOI: 10.1021/jp111420q

The vibrational spectra of four ionic liquids, sharing the same imidazolium cation but containing different anions-bmimNO3, bmirnBF4, bmimPF6, and bmimNTf2-have been obtained using normal-mode analysis within the harmonic approximation and from velocity autocorrelation fimctions from a molecular dynamics trajectory generated using empirical force fields. The vibrational density of states obtained from the two methods agree well. The low frequency modes (<100 cm(-1)) exhibit a red shift with an increase in the anion size. Deuteration of the ring hydrogens leads to a negligible change in this region of the spectrum. The participation ratio of low frequency modes is large, implying that they are not localized to a few atoms. The low frequency band arises primarily from short-range interionic interactions, and the exact peak position is modulated by the cation-anion hydrogen bond strength. Results obtained from these force-field-based calculations are confirmed by ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of crystalline bmimPF6.

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