Equilibrium structure and relative stability of glyceraldehyde conformers: Gas-phase electron diffraction (GED) and quantum-chemical studies

For the first time, the five dimensional (5-D) analysis of potential energy surface (PES) from quantum-chemical calculations was carried out to predict reliably the various glyceraldehyde (GLA) conformers. 36 conformers with relative stabilities up to 38 kJ/mol were found in the B3LYP approximation. According to results of MP2/cc-pVQZ calculations, the molecule exists at the experimental temperature of 388 K as a mixture of five conformers in the ratio I:II:III:IV:V = 63:18:4:10:5. Contrary to the theoretical conclusion of Lovas et al., the conformer IV is predicted to be more stable than the conformer III. Our result can explain why the conformer IV could be detected in the microwave (MW) spectroscopic experiment by Lovas et al., whereas the conformer III could not. For the first time, thermal-average and equilibrium structural parameters of GLA (main conformer) have been determined from gas-phase electron diffraction (GED) data. Vibrational corrections to the experimental bond lengths were determined using quadratic and cubic force constants from high-level ab initio calculations (MP2/cc-pVTZ). It was shown that the experimental intensities are sensitive to the contribution of the second conformer (27(15)%). Rotational constants calculated from MP2/cc-pVQZ geometries were found to be in excellent agreement with the experimental rotational constants corrected for anharmonic effects.