Structural parameters, electronic, linear and nonlinear optical exploration of thiopyrimidine derivatives: A comparison between DFT/TDDFT and experimental study

The pyrimidine ring is significantly distributed in nature due to its existence in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) as nitrogenous bases. The heterocyclic aromatic compounds have become an important pharmacophore due to promising applications in medicine and nonlinear optics (NLO) fields. Keeping in view of the significance of 4-thiopyrimidines derivatives, we selected phenyl pyrimidine derivatives namely: ethyl 4-((3-chlorobenzyl)thio)-6-methyl-2-phenylpyrimidine-5-carboxylate (1), (4-((4-chlorobenzyl)thio)-6-methyl-2-phenyl-pyrimidin-5-yl)methanol (2) and 4-((4-chlorobenzyl)thio)-5,6-dimethyl-2-phenylpyrimidine (3) for NLO study and comparative analysis. Overall, density functional theory (DFT) findings of structural parameters at B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) level show excellent concurrence with the experimental data which confirms the purity of 1, 2 and 3. The vibrational analysis of 1, 2 and 3 have been carried out by DFT calculations based on B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) level of theory. The natural bonding orbital (NBO) analysis has been used to get insight into non-covalent interactions. From DFT calculations, various parameters such as natural population analysis (NPA) atomic charges, HOMO–LUMO energies and global reactivity parameters have been obtained. The molecular electronic potential (MEP) and parametric molecular electrostatic potential (PMEP) have also been derived for 1, 2 and 3. The photophysical properties of investigated molecules were estimated using time dependent DFT (TDDFT) at B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) level of theory. Nonlinear optical (NLO) analysis has also been carried out by DFT calculations with B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) functional. The NLO properties of 1, 2 and 3 were observed larger as compared to the standard molecule indicating the considerable NLO character of all molecules especially recommended the NLO activity of 1 for optoelectronic associated hi-tech applications.