The discovery of the hydrogen bond from p-Nitrothiophenol by Raman spectroscopy: Guideline for the thioalcohol molecule recognition tool

Inter- and intra- molecular hydrogen bonding plays important role in determining molecular structure, physical and chemical properties, which may be easily ignored for molecules with a non-typical hydrogen bonding structure. We demonstrated in this paper that the hydrogen bonding is responsible for the different Raman spectra in solid and solution states of p-Nitrothiophenol (PNTP). The consistence of the theoretical calculation and experiment reveals that the intermolecular hydrogen bonding yields an octatomic ring structure (8) of PNTP in the solid state, confirmed by the characteristic S-H---O stretching vibration mode at 2550 cm-1; when it comes to the solution state, the breakage of hydrogen bond of S-H---O induced the S-H stretching vibration at 2590 cm-1. Our findings may provide a simple and fast method for identifying the intermolecular hydrogen bonding.