Gas-phase ion chemistry of relevant substances in materials science

Author(s)

Luciano Aparecido Xavier

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Conjunto das Químicas (IQ e FCF) (CQ/DBDCQ)
• Defense date: 2003-04-28

Examining board members

José Manuel Riveros; José Fernando Gregori Faigle; Ione Iga; Nelson Henrique Morgon; Gerardo Gerson Bezerra de Souza

• Advisor: José Manuel Riveros

Abstract

The present thesis describes the study of the gas-phase ion chemistry of a number of organometallic compounds such as Ge(OEt)4, Ti(i-Pro)4, BU3SnOMe, GeE4, GeMe4, SiMe4 and Me6Si2NH. Several aspects of the ion chemistry of these compounds were investigated including fragmentation processes in their mass spectra, reactivity of cations and anions obtained from these compounds by electron ionization, photodissociation of hypervalent species formed by nucleophilic addition, and the proton affinity of a number of germanium-containing anions. Additional experimental investigations were carried out to characterize the structure of hypervalent studies and to explore analytical applications of unknown germanium-containing substrates. The results in several cases are sufficiently conclusive such that a general section of conclusions was considered unnecessary. For example, the metal alkoxides studied in this work react with fluoride ion in the gas-phase by an addition-elimination mechanism that initially results in the formation of a pentacoordinated species. The germanium and titanium pentacoordinated species absorb readily infrared radiation from a CO2 laser and undergo successive elimination of sim pie neturals by sequential mutiphoton absorption. This behavior is not observed for the metal alkyls. Cations derived from these compounds are powerful Lewis acids and are capable of promoting addition-elimination reactions with several neutral substrates that can act as Lewis bases. The most surprising reactions have been the abstraction of methide (formally a CH3- ion) by some of these cations followed, in the case of some Si- and Ge-containing ions, by a ligand exchange reaction. The proton affinity of Ge-containing anions obtained from the photodissociation of hypervalent precursors was established using the bracketing technique by studying the proton abstraction reaction with a number of substrates of well-known proton affinities. The absolute values derived for the proton affinities of these species, and the corresponding gas-phase acidities of the conjugate acids are close to the values of similar mercaptans. (AU)