Electron Donor-Acceptor Nature of the Ethanol-CO2 Dimer

Supercritical CO2 is an appealing nontoxic, environmentally friendly solvent for the industrial extraction of many classes of compounds, from caffeine to natural product drug precursors to petrochemical impurities. Apolar in isolation, the ability of supercritical CO2 to dissolve polar species has been empirically shown to be greatly enhanced by the addition of a small molar percentage of a polar cosolvent, often ethanol. Computational work predicts that the isolated ethanol-CO2 complex can exist either in an electron-donor configuration or through a hydrogen-bonding one; yet, neither has been previously experimentally observed. Here, we demonstrate by rotational spectroscopy that the isolated, gas-phase ethanol-CO2 dimer is an electron donor-acceptor complex.