Laser ablated boron atoms have been reacted with hydrogen sulfide and the reaction products condensed with argon at 4 K, which gave BS2, BS2-, HSBS, and HBS molecules. Reagent isotopic substitution （H2S, H234S, D2S, 10 B, 11B） and variation of boron and hydrogen sulfide concentrations have been used to identify the major products. Both BS2-- and BS2 were identified as linear molecules with no significant difference in the structure parameters, but the B-S anti-symmetric stretching vibration of BS2 is significantly lower than that of BS2-, which is ascribed to pseudo Jahn-Teller effect. Theoretical calculation was employed to have an insight into the interaction nature of the bonds in the corresponding products.
The reaction of laser-ablated vanadium, niobium and tantalum atoms with hydrogen sulfide has been investigated using matrix isolation FTIR and theoretical calculations. The metal atoms inserted into the H-S bond of H2S to form the HMSH molecules （M=V, Nb, Ta）, which rearranged to H2MS molecules on annealing for Nb and Ta. The HMSH molecule can also further react with another H2S to form the H2M（SH）2 molecules. These new molecules were identified on the basis of the D2S and H234S isotopic substitutions. DFT （B3LYP and BPW91） theoretical calculations are used to predict energies, geometries, and vibrational frequencies for these novel metal dihydrido complexes and molecules. Reaction mechanism for formation of group V dihydrido complex was investigated by DFT internal reaction coordinate calculations. The dissociation of HVSH gave VS＋H2 on broad band irradiation and reverse reaction happened on annealing. Based on B3LYP calculation releasing hydrogen from HVSH is endothermic only by 13.5 kcal/mol with lower energy barrier of 16.9 kcal/mol.
