Honors College Theses

Publication Date

5-3-2016

Major

Chemistry (B.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (restricted to Georgia Southern)

Faculty Mentor

Dr. Ryan Fortenberry

Abstract

The discovery of ArH+ in the interstellar medium has shown that noble gas chemistry may be of more chemical significance than previously believed. The present work uses quantum chemical techniques to describe undetected noble gas compunds. Both ArH2 + and ArH3 + were found to act as possible intermediates in the formation of ArH+. However their neon counterparts seem to be too stable as lone entities to form bonds. The stability of neon could be the cause of the absence of a neonium, NeH+ detection, even though neon is far more abundant than argon. The Ar2H3 + was studied and compared to experimental data, concluding that computational quantum methods used to simulate the spectroscpic data are highly accurate. The study was extended to included NeOH+ and ArOH+ which provide spectroscopic data suggesting that they are the most stable small noble gas molecules. ArOH+ is once again more stable than the neon cation, but both are well-behaved enough for a complete quartic force field analysis of their rovibrational properties. The resulting data should be of significant assistance for the laboratory or observational analysis of these potential interstellar molecules.

Download

Share

COinS