Twins in rotational spectroscopy: Does a rotational spectrum uniquely identify a molecule?

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schwarting, Marcus, Seifert, Nathan A., Davis, Michael J., Blaiszik, Ben, Foster, Ian, Prozument, Kirill
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Schwarting, Marcus
Seifert, Nathan A.
Davis, Michael J.
Blaiszik, Ben
Foster, Ian
Prozument, Kirill
author_facet Schwarting, Marcus
Seifert, Nathan A.
Davis, Michael J.
Blaiszik, Ben
Foster, Ian
Prozument, Kirill
contents Rotational spectroscopy is the most accurate method for determining structures of molecules in the gas phase. It is often assumed that a rotational spectrum is a unique "fingerprint" of a molecule. The availability of large molecular databases and the development of artificial intelligence methods for spectroscopy makes the testing of this assumption timely. In this paper, we pose the determination of molecular structures from rotational spectra as an inverse problem. Within this framework, we adopt a funnel-based approach to search for molecular twins, which are two or more molecules, which have similar rotational spectra but distinctly different molecular structures. We demonstrate that there are twins within standard levels of computational accuracy by generating rotational constants for many molecules from several large molecular databases, indicating the inverse problem is ill-posed. However, some twins can be distinguished by increasing the accuracy of the theoretical methods or by performing additional experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_04225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Twins in rotational spectroscopy: Does a rotational spectrum uniquely identify a molecule?
Schwarting, Marcus
Seifert, Nathan A.
Davis, Michael J.
Blaiszik, Ben
Foster, Ian
Prozument, Kirill
Chemical Physics
Machine Learning
Rotational spectroscopy is the most accurate method for determining structures of molecules in the gas phase. It is often assumed that a rotational spectrum is a unique "fingerprint" of a molecule. The availability of large molecular databases and the development of artificial intelligence methods for spectroscopy makes the testing of this assumption timely. In this paper, we pose the determination of molecular structures from rotational spectra as an inverse problem. Within this framework, we adopt a funnel-based approach to search for molecular twins, which are two or more molecules, which have similar rotational spectra but distinctly different molecular structures. We demonstrate that there are twins within standard levels of computational accuracy by generating rotational constants for many molecules from several large molecular databases, indicating the inverse problem is ill-posed. However, some twins can be distinguished by increasing the accuracy of the theoretical methods or by performing additional experiments.
title Twins in rotational spectroscopy: Does a rotational spectrum uniquely identify a molecule?
topic Chemical Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04225