Computational identification of a global carbon–sulfur triply bonded isomer SCBO

Searching for stable sulfur–carbon triply bonded molecules has been of great interest from both the fundamental and applied viewpoints. The known polyatomic sulfur–carbon triply bonded molecules are usually not the global minima. Here, we report a potential energy surface investigation of a tetra-atomic molecule [S,C,B,O] in both doublet and quartet states. The B3LYP and M06-2X methodologies with 6-311+G(3df,2p) and aug-cc-pVTZ basis sets were applied for geometrical optimization and CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ for single-point energy calculations. The thermodynamically most stable isomer is the linear SCBO 01 (0.0 kcal/mol). Kinetically, SCBO 01 is separated from the other isomers and fragments by the rather high barriers of at least 44.7 kcal/mol. In particular, isomer SCBO 01 contains a typical carbon–sulfur triple bond based on the systematic analysis from the structure, vibrational frequency, molecular orbital, Wiberg bond index, and adiabatic bond dissociation energy. In addition, there exists a second low-lying isomer, i.e., linear SBCO 02 (7.3 kcal/mol) with S≡B triple bonding, whose kinetic stability is governed by its fragmentation to 2SB+1CO (30.4 kcal/mol). The remaining isomers are either kinetically unstable with low conversion barriers or energetically very high lying. We propose that the simple two-body association between SC and BO, SB and CO pairs can preferentially lead to the formation and stabilization of SCBO 01 and SBCO 02, respectively. The isomer SCBO 01, which is the global structure and extraordinarily stable against both isomerization and fragmentation, strongly deserves future laboratory studies.