Strong anharmonicity in the vibrational spectra of Cu+(H2O)(H2)2

For some years now, research on adsorptive separation of hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium (D) and
tritium (T) has been evolving with a view toward nuclear fusion. Experimental and theoretical investigations
show that H2 strongly binds to undercoordinated Cu+ sites and more strongly when one H2O ligand is added
to Cu+.[1] To understand the vibrational behavior that drives the hydrogen isotopologue selectivity of
Cu+(H2O)(H2)2 formation, harmonic and anharmonic vibrational spectra have been computed and compared
to infrared photodissociation (IRPD) spectroscopy results from the gas phase. Our calculations show that
geometries and harmonic frequencies at the MP2/def2-TZVPP level match CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ ones
very closely. Scaling the harmonic frequencies by a factor of 0.95 [2] improves the agreement with the
available experimental data, but fails to produce the combination bands. By contrast, anharmonic VPT2
calculations at the MP2/def2-TZVPP level not only predict these bands but they also reproduce the
experimental frequencies very well. In addition to that, we found a similar structure for Cu+(H2O)(H2)2 as a
previous study[1]: a planar arrangement with C2v symmetry (Figure 1) but with a significantly shorter
Cu+–H2 bond length (1.62 Å vs 1.71 Å). Finally, the obtained results show that CCSD(T) calculations are
not required and VPT2 frequencies at the MP2/def2-TZVPP level are identified as a particularly good
compromise for future modeling of the vibrational properties driving isotopologue-selective H2 adsorption
at undercoordinated Cu+ sites.

Reference
[1] Paul R. Kemper et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 120:51,13494-13502 (1998)
[2] N. Heine et al., J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 6(12):2298-2304 (2015)