Estudo das propriedades espectroscópicas de moléculas orgânicas em solução utilizando a combinação do modelo contínuo PCM e o método sequencial QM/MM

Abstract

As most of spectroscopic measurements occur in solution, the solvent effect in the spectral properties of molecular systems is of great scientific interest. In particular, when the formation of hydrogen bond between the solute and solvent molecules occurs, the traditional effective dielectric solvent models provides inadequate results in some situations of interest. This is the case of diazines in aqueous solution. In this work, we study the solvent effects on the low-lying n=>π* absorption transition and on the 15N chemical shielding of diazines in water using the combination of Monte Carlo simulations and Quantum Mechanical calculations. As the classical simulations and the Quantum Mechanical calculations are uncoupled, a special attention is devoted to the solute polarization. Firstly, this is included by a previously developed iterative procedure where the solute is electrostatically equilibrated with the solvent. In addition, we verify the simple yet unexplored alternative of combining the polarizable continuum model (PCM) and the hybrid QM/MM method. In this procedure, we use PCM to obtain the average solute polarization and include this in the MM part of the sequential QM/MM methodology, PCM-MM/QM. These procedures are compared and further used in discrete and explicit solvent models. As the solute geometry is unchanged during all process, we study the influence of small differences on the molecular conformation in the spectroscopic properties using as prototype some recently sintetized quinone based molecules with antitrypanocidal activity. This study showed that small changes in the molecular conformation provide a small impact in the studied spectroscopic properties. The two implemented procedures in this work were systematically performed for each diazine and they were used in discrete and explicit solvent models for the calculations of the spectroscopic properties of each diazine in water as solvent. The results show good agreement between the values obtained by the two polarization methods. Considering the simplicity of the PCM over the iterative polarization method, this is na important aspect and the computational savings point to the possibility of dealing with larger solute molecules. This PCM-MM/QM approach conciliates the simplicity of the PCM model with the reliability of the combined QM/MM approaches.