Effect of the Medium on the Electronic Structures of the Anthranilic Acid Conformers: A Theoretical Study

As a fundamental point of view, the effect of the medium on the electronic structure of related conformers when switching among different types of H-bonds has not received any considerable attention. To investigate this point, conformers of anthranilic acid were adopted as model structures. The solvent effect was examined using the polarizable continuum model (PCM) and six media; gas phase, benzene, 1,2-dichloroethane, acetone, dimethyl sulfoxide, and water. The results illustrate that the type of the H-bond can be a critical factor in controlling response of conformers to the medium. This conclusion was reached after analyzing the relative energies, the individual stabilization energies, the dipole moments, the charge delocalization energies, the atomic charges, and the frontier orbitals. From a fundamental point of view and to best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the literature that addressed this issue and therefore considered a new addition to the H-bond theory.