High-level ab initio calculations for the four low-lying families of minima of$(H2O)20$⁠. II. Spectroscopic signatures of the dodecahedron, fused cubes, face-sharing pentagonal prisms, and edge-sharing pentagonal prisms hydrogen bonding networks

We report the first harmonic vibrational spectra for each of the lowest lying isomers within the four major families of minima of $(H2O)20$⁠, namely, the dodecahedron, fused cubes, face-sharing pentagonal prisms, and edge-sharing pentagonal prisms. These were obtained at the second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation level of theory (MP2) with the augmented correlation consistent basis set of double zeta quality (aug-cc-pVDZ) at the corresponding minimum energy geometries. The computed infrared (IR) spectra are the first ones obtained from first principles for these clusters. They were found to contain spectral features, which can be directly mapped onto the distinctive spectroscopic signatures of their constituent tetramer, pentamer, and octamer fragments. The dodecahedron spectra show the richest structure in the OH stretching region and are associated with the most redshifted OH vibrations with respect to the monomer. The lowest lying edge-sharing pentagonal prism isomer displays intense IR active vibrations that are redshifted by $∼600cm−1$ with respect to the water monomer. Furthermore the most redshifted, IR-active OH stretching vibrations for all four networks correspond to hydrogen bonded OH groups, which exhibit the following two common characteristics: (i) they belong to fragments which have a “free” OH stretch and (ii) they act as donors to a neighboring water molecule along a “dimerlike” (strong) hydrogen bond. The zero-point energy corrected MP2/CBS (complete basis set) limit binding energies $D0$ for the four isomers are −163.1 kcal/mol (edge-sharing pentagonal prism), −160.1 kcal/mol (face-sharing pentagonal prism), −157.5 kcal/mol (fused cubes), and −148.1 kcal/mol (dodecahedron).