Vibrational states of tetrahedral molecular species in electric fields. A theoretical model for quantitative description of the latent symmetry effects in vibrational spectroscopy of matrix isolated tetrahedral species.

A theoretical model that enables a quantitative description of latent symmetry effects in the case of matrix isolated tetrahedral species is developed. Several particular cases are considered, that are of special interest from vibrational spectroscopic viewpoint. It is shown that the observed appearances of the IR spectra of various XY4n- anions isomorphously isolated in solid matrices may be systematically explained in terms of the orientation of the effective local crystalline field vector. The model also principally enables calculation of the magnitude of the effective local homogeneous field vector as well as its direction with respect to the symmetry elements of the dopant species, and it can be successively corrected accounting for the field non-homogeneity. Also, a solid theoretical basis is for the first time presented for the significantly smaller site group splitting of the nu4 modes of dopant XY4n- species in comparison to the splitting of nu3 ones, which is often observed in the IR spectra. However, the presented approach has potentially a much wider applicability, as it in facts considers the vibrational states of tetrahedral molecular species in electric fields, which may be of a different origin, for example, electrodes in electrochemical systems, external fields in Stark-type spectroscopies, etc.