A theoretical study on CH2N2 isomers: structure and energetics

Five CH2N2 isomers, namely cyanamide, carbodiimide, diazomethane, isocyanamide and nitrilimine, have been investigated at a high level of accuracy. The singles and doubles coupled-cluster method including a perturbational correction for connected triple excitations, CCSD(T), in conjunction with correlation-consistent basis sets ranging in size from triple to quintuple zeta have been employed. Extrapolation to the complete basis set limit has been used with treatments of core-valence correlation effects in order to accurately predict structures, relative energies as well as N-H and C-H bond dissociation energies. The latter required to also investigate the HNNC radical with the same methodology used for CH2N2 isomers, while HCNN and HNCN data are available in the literature by the same authors (Puzzarini and Gambi in J Chem Phys 122:064316, 2005). For all the species studied, harmonic vibrational frequencies have also been evaluated at the CCSD(T) level in order to obtain zero-point corrections to total energies.