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Obtaining deuterated microgels is essential to characterize their architecture and determine their response to crowding using neutron scattering. Here, we explain the effect of deuteration on the phase transition temperature.

Bio-hybrid fuels are a promising solution to accomplish a carbon-neutral and low-emission future for the transportation sector. Two potential candidates are the heterocyclic acetals 1,3-dioxane (C

Vibrational spectroscopy in supersonic jet expansions is a powerful tool to assess molecular aggregates in close to ideal conditions for the benchmarking of quantum chemical approaches. The low temperatures achieved as well as the absence of environment effects allow for a direct comparison between computed and experimental spectra. This provides potential benchmarking data which can be revisited to hone different computational techniques, and it allows for the critical analysis of procedures under the setting of a blind challenge. In the latter case, the final result is unknown to modellers, providing an unbiased testing opportunity for quantum chemical models. In this work, we present the spectroscopic and computational results for the first HyDRA blind challenge. The latter deals with the prediction of water donor stretching vibrations in monohydrates of organic molecules. This edition features a test set of 10 systems. Experimental water donor OH vibrational wavenumbers for the vacuum-isolated monohydrates of formaldehyde, tetrahydrofuran, pyridine, tetrahydrothiophene, trifluoroethanol, methyl lactate, dimethylimidazolidinone, cyclooctanone, trifluoroacetophenone and 1-phenylcyclohexane-cis-1,2-diol are provided. The results of the challenge show promising predictive properties in both purely quantum mechanical approaches as well as regression and other machine learning strategies.

ChemPhysChem e202200783 (2023). doi:10.1002/cphc.202200783, Published by Wiley-VCH Verl., Weinheim

This work presents a novel parametrization for the ReaxFF formalism as a means to investigate reaction processes of chlorinated organic compounds. Force field parameters cover the chemical elements C, H, O, Cl and were obtained using a novel optimization approach involving relaxed potential energy surface scans as training targets. The resulting ReaxFF parametrization shows good transferability, as demonstrated on two independent ab initio validation sets. While this first part of our two-paper series focuses on force field parametrization, we apply our parameters to the simulation of chlorinated dibenzofuran formation and decomposition processes in Part II.

The spectroscopic quantification of mixture compositions usually requires pure compounds and mixtures of known composition for calibration. Since they are not always available, methods to fill such gaps have evolved, which are, however, not generally applicable. Therefore, calibration can be extremely challenging, especially when multiple instable species, e.g. intermediates, exist in a system. This study presents a new calibration approach that uses ab initio Molecular Dynamics (AIMD)-simulated spectra as to set up and calibrate models for the physics-based spectral analysis method Indirect Hard Modeling (IHM). To demonstrate our approach called AIMD-IHM, we analyze Raman spectra of ternary hydrogen-bonding mixtures of acetone, methanol, and ethanol. The derived AIMD-IHM pure-component models and calibration coefficients are in good agreement with conventionally generated experimental results. The method yields compositions with prediction errors of less than 5% without any experimental calibration input. Our approach can be extended, in principle, to IR and NMR spectroscopy and allows for the analysis of systems that were hitherto inaccessible to quantitative spectroscopic analysis.