Effect of solvents on intra- and inter-molecular interactions of oligothiophenes.

CONTEXT: Oligothiophenes have long been used as model compounds to understand the chemistry of polythiophenes. Herein, we have some quantum chemical calculations and intra- and inter-molecular interaction calculations of a series of oligothiophenes such as terthiophene, quintetthiophene, sevensthiophene, terthiophene-terthiophene, terthiophene-water, terthiophene-methanol, and terthiophene-chloroform performed by time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT), density functional theory (DFT), and Multiwfn: a multifunctional wavefunction analyzer. The UV-vis spectra, HOMO-LUMO energies, NBO analysis, MEP, molecular structures, and electronic properties were computed using DFT/TD-DFT at the level of B3LYP/6-31+ G (d,p) and described. The nature of molecular interactions between terthiophene and solvents like water, methanol, and chloroform were also investigated using non-covalent interaction index (NCI), reduced density gradient (RDG), localized orbital locator (LOL), and electron localization function (ELF) topological analyses. Besides, Fukui functions and energy of population density-of-states were computed using the same method. The calculation results show that there are some changes in the terthiophene with the addition of solvent to the medium.

METHODS: DFT calculations were performed using the Gaussian 09 software and GaussView 5.0 visulation program. Multiwfn software is used to calculate the reduced density gradient (RDG) scatterplots, non-covalent interactions (NCI), ELF, LOL, Fukui analysis, and energy of population density-of-states of oligothiophenes.