2-Methoxyethanol: harmonic tricks, anharmonic challenges and chirality-sensitive chain aggregation

Abstract

The Raman spectrum of jet-cooled, nearly monoconformational 2-methoxyethanol reveals a strong, aggregation-sensitive resonance in the backbone stretching region and pronounced chirality-dependent dimerisation effects in the OH stretching region. These effects are disentangled by a dual-detection scheme which simultaneously probes the two spectral regions. The performance of mass-scaled harmonic wavenumber predictions and of vibrational perturbation theory in reproducing these spectral features is explored.