Polymorphism in Br2 clathrate hydrates

The structure and composition of bromine clathrate hydrate has been controversial for more than 170 years due to the large variation of its observed stoichiometrics. Several different crystal structures were proposed before 1997 when Udachin et al. (Udachin, K. A.; Enright, G. D.; Ratcliffe, C. I.; Ripmeester, J. A. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1997, 119, 11481) concluded that Br-2 forms only the tetragonal structure (TS-I). We show polymorphism in Br-2 clathrate hydrates by identifying two distinct crystal structures through optical microscopy and resonant Raman spectroscopy on single crystals. After growing TS-I crystals from a liquid bromine-water solution, upon dropping the temperature slightly below -7 degrees C, new crystals of cubic morphology form. The new crystals, which have a limited thermal stability range, are assigned to the CS-II structure. The two structures are clearly distinguished by the resonant Raman spectra of the enclathrated Br-2, which show long overtone progressions and allow the extraction of accurate vibrational parameters: omega(c) = 321.2 +/- 0.1 cm(-1) and omega(e)x(e) = 0.82 +/- 0.05 cm(-1) in TS-I and omega(e) = 317.5 +/- 0.1 cm(-1) and omega(e)x(e) = 0.70 +/- 0.1 cm(-1) in CS-II. On the basis of structural analysis, the discovery of the CS-II crystals implies stability of a large class of bromine hydrate structures and, therefore, polymorphism.