Trifluoroethanol (TFE) and its aggregates are studied via supersonic jet FTIR and Raman spectroscopy as well as by quantum chemistry and simple force field approaches. A multi-slit nozzle is introduced to study collisionally excited clusters. Efforts are made to extract harmonic frequencies from experiment for better comparison to theory. Based on deuteration, the OH stretching anharmonicity changes weakly upon dimerization, but increases for trimers. Among the possible dimer conformations, only an all-gauche, homoconfigurational, compact, OH-F connected structure is observed in an extreme case of chiral discrimination. Quantum tunneling assisted pathways for this surprising helicity synchronization are postulated. The oscillator coupling in hydrogen-bonded trimers is analyzed. Trans conformations of TFE start to become important for trimers and probably persist in the liquid state. Simple force fields can be refined to capture some molecular recognition features of TFE dimer, but their limitations are emphasized.

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2,2,2-Trifluoroethanol molecules synchronize their transiently chiral gauche configurations upon dimerization in supersonic jet expansions, while they avoid an energetically competitive heteroconfigurational hydrogen bonded dimer topology predicted by extensive quantum chemical calculations.

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Supersonic jet FTIR spectra of the OH stretching vibrations in complexes of mono-, di- and trifluoroethanol with water are presented. In contrast to the non-fluorinated ethanol case, the fluorinated alcohols are all shown to act as O-H···O hydrogen bond donors towards water. This is found to be mostly a consequence of the intramolecular electron-withdrawing effect of the fluorine atoms and, with decreasing importance for increasing fluorination, due to the attractive intermolecular contact between one of the dangling water OH groups and the fluorine atoms. The findings provide a stepwise rationalization for the hydrophobic properties of the pharmaceutically important trifluoromethyl group.