The Role of Substituents in Optical Rotation of Oxiranes, Oxetanes, and Oxathietanes

Taking as examples a series of oxiranes, oxetanes, and oxathietanes with different substituents, we study in a systematic way the role that the latter play on the optical rotation of the molecules. For this, we use time-dependent density functional theory together with a hierarchy of Dunning’s basis sets. The B3LYP and CAM-B3LYP exchange-correlation functionals are employed. We select results obtained with the CAM-B3LYP functional and the daug-cc-pVTZ basis set as our reference values. Additionally, specific rotation in all systems is calculated with the ORP basis set, specifically designed to carry out optical rotation calculations. The present study shows its good performance in CAM-B3LYP estimations of this property, providing results close to the reference values. The proper choice of the exchange-correlation functional proves to be much more important than that of the basis set. Considering the effect of the substituents, some of the presently investigated molecules show a behavior in line with earlier findings; however we have also found systems that do not match the conclusions previously available in the literature