Density Functional Study on Geometries and Stability of cis and trans isomers of Difluoroethylene

The geometries and their harmonic frequencies of the difluoroethylene isomers were gradient optimized using ab initio methods at the different levels. High-level methods give very good structural parameters in comparison to experiment. The single energy of stable structure and the frontier orbital energy gap were calculated using MP4SDTQ/6-311++G(2df,2pd) method, and it is found that the single energy of stable structure of cis isomer is lower than that of trans isomer. This is consistent with the experimental result. Mulliken population analyses were also performed to interpret the internal nature of cis preference of difluoroethylene isomers.