Ab initio and analytic intermolecular potentials for Ar–CH3OH

Ab initio calculations at the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ level of theory were used to characterize the Ar–CH3OH intermolecular potential energy surface (PES). Potential energy curves were calculated for four different Ar + CH3OH orientations and used to derive an analytic function for the intermolecular PES. A sum of Ar–C, Ar–O, Ar–H(C), and Ar–H(O) two-body potentials gives an excellent fit to these potential energy curves up to 100 kcal mol−1, and adding an additional r−n term to the Buckingham two-body potential results in only a minor improvement in the fit. Three Ar–CH3OH van der Waals minima were found from the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ//MP2/aug-cc-pVTZ calculations. The structure of the global minimum is in overall good agreement with experiment (X.-C. Tan, L. Sun and R. L. Kuczkowski, J. Mol. Spectrosc., 1995, 171, 248). It is T-shaped with the hydroxyl H-atom syn with respect to Ar. Extrapolated to the complete basis set (CBS) limit, the global minimum has a well depth of 0.72 kcal mol−1 with basis set superposition error (BSSE) correction. The aug-cc-pVTZ basis set gives a well depth only 0.10 kcal mol−1 smaller than this value. The well depths of the other two minima are within 0.16 kcal mol−1 of the global minimum. The analytic Ar–CH3OH intermolecular potential also identifies these three minima as the only van der Waals minima and the structures predicted by the analytic potential are similar to the ab initio structures. The analytic potential identifies the same global minimum and the predicted well depths for the minima are within 0.05 kcal mol−1 of the ab initio values. Combining this Ar–CH3OH intermolecular potential with a potential for a OH-terminated alkylthiolate self-assembled monolayer surface (i.e., HO-SAM) provides a potential to model Ar + HO-SAM collisions.