Chemical bonding valence bond potential energy

C.Q. Sun, Angular-resolved VLEED from O-Cu(OOl) Valence bands, chemical bonds, potential barrier, and energy states. Int. J. Mod. Phys. B 11(25), 3073-3091 (1997)... 

We refer to models where we write the total potential energy in terms of chemical endties such as bond lengths, bond angles, dihedral angles and so on as valence force field models. 

The empirical valence bond (EVB) approach introduced by Warshel and co-workers is an effective way to incorporate environmental effects on breaking and making of chemical bonds in solution. It is based on parame-terizations of empirical interactions between reactant states, product states, and, where appropriate, a number of intermediate states. The interaction parameters, corresponding to off-diagonal matrix elements of the classical Hamiltonian, are calibrated by ab initio potential energy surfaces in solu-fion and relevant experimental data. This procedure significantly reduces the computational expenses of molecular level calculations in comparison to direct ab initio calculations. The EVB approach thus provides a powerful avenue for studying chemical reactions and proton transfer events in complex media, with a multitude of applications in catalysis, biochemistry, and PEMs. 

The bottleneck of very short lifetimes of resonace states (10 14s) becomes less severe once one assumes that the primary role of resonance states is to provide doorways to bound valence anionic states, with lifetimes determined by kinetics of the following chemical reactions [36], The reactions might proceed on these regions of potential energy surfaces, at which valence anions are bound with respect to the neutral species. The rates of these chemical transformations, e.g., the SSB formation, do not have to compete with short lifetimes of resonance states. It is worth noting that even for a kinetic barrier of ca. 20 kcal/mol, the half lifetime amounts (at 298 K) to about 30 seconds. Hence, if the kinetic barrier for SSB formation were lower than 20-23 kcal/mol, all nucleotides that could form stable anions would have enough time to cleave the C-O bond on the timescale of the electrophoretic assay of DNA damage. 

On the theoretical side the H20-He systems has a sufficiently small number of electrons to be tackled by the most sophisticated quantum-chemical techniques, and in the last two decades several calculations by various methods of electronic structure theory have been attempted [77-80]. More recently, new sophisticated calculations appeared in the literature they exploited combined symmetry - adapted perturbation theory SAPT and CCSD(T), purely ab initio SAPT [81,82], and valence bond methods [83]. A thorough comparison of the topology, the properties of the stationary points, and the anisotropy of potential energy surfaces obtained with coupled cluster, Moller-Plesset, and valence bond methods has been recently presented [83]. 

---