What is so mysterious about the electronic states of SCI?

Abstract

The 15 lowest lying doublet electronic states of the molecule SCI have been investigated theoretically at a high level of correlation treatment (MRCI). For the ground state (X ²II), spectroscopic constants were obtained from a set of eight vibrational intervals. This result extends our knowledge about this state beyond the experimentally known data that presently were derived from only two bands. Spin-orbit constants, transition probabilities and radiative lifetimes complement its spectroscopic characterization. For the excited electronic states, a global view of the doublet states is presented that can help us understand the scarcity of experimental data on electronic transitions for this system and also the difficulty of assigning the only two transitions so far recorded. Most of these states are repulsive, and for the few high lying bound ones, of Rydberg character, avoided crossings restrict the number of accessible vibrational states. Crossing by repulsive states and predissociation is also a factor that can prevent further emissions. Two new bound excited states, ²δ and ²Σ, predicted in this study, are of direct relevance to an interpretation of the limited experimental data available on electronic transitions.