Potential energy surfaces electronic structure methods

In comparison with the empirical potentials and the electronic structure methods mentioned above, such purely mathematical fitting procedures are still much less commonly used. Nevertheless, a lot of methodical work is going on to improve the accuracy and to extend the applicability of potential-energy surfaces without a physically derived (and constrained) functional form. The advantage of this type of potentials is that no approximations have to be introduced which could limit the accuracy. On the other hand, a lot of effort has to be made to ensure that all physical features of a PES are correctly included. 

The hrst step in theoretical predictions of pathway branching are electronic structure ab initio) calculations to define at least the lowest Born-Oppenheimer electronic potential energy surface for a system. For a system of N atoms, the PES has (iN — 6) dimensions, and is denoted V Ri,R2, - , RiN-6)- At a minimum, the energy, geometry, and vibrational frequencies of stationary points (i.e., asymptotes, wells, and saddle points where dV/dRi = 0) of the potential surface must be calculated. For the statistical methods described in Section IV.B, information on other areas of the potential are generally not needed. However, it must be stressed that failure to locate relevant stationary points may lead to omission of valid pathways. For this reason, as wide a search as practicable must be made through configuration space to ensure that the PES is sufficiently complete. Furthermore, a search only of stationary points will not treat pathways that avoid transition states. 

The topic of this review, reactions at metal surfaces, has been in general treated in a similar way to gas-phase reactivity. High level ab initio electronic structure methods are used to construct potential energy surfaces of catalytically important surface reactions in reduced dimensions. Once a chemically accurate potential surface is available, quantum or classical dynamics may be carried out in order to more deeply understand the microscopic nature of the reaction. 

During the last decades, a large body of structural information has been derived from gas-electron diffraction studies. The corresponding results are nearly exclusively reported in the literature in terms of r distances, or the equivalent thermal average intemuclear distances, which are denoted r. The r distances are defined by the relation, r = r — If. Alternative methods for interpreting gas-electron diffraction data are possible, for example, in terms of -geometries5, but they are currently too complex to apply in routine stmctural analyses, because they require detailed information on the molecular potential energy surface which is not usually available. 

These results have been recently confirmed by more elaborate ab initio methods including electron correlation and polarizability functions. Structure [7] (Scheme 6c) is found to be more stable than [9] by only 1.5 kcal mol-1. Structure [8] does not exist as a minimum on the potential energy surface and spontaneously collapses to [7]. 

Another major, future advance in the quantum chemical computation of potential energy surfaces for reaction dynamics will be the ability to routinely compute the energies of molecular systems on the fly . The tedious and time-consuming process of fitting computed quantum chemical values to functional forms could be avoided if it were possible to compute the PES as needed during a classical trajectory or quantum dynamics calculation. For many chemical reactions, it should be practical in the near future to prudently select a sufficiently rapid and accurate electronic structure method to facilitate dynamics computations on the fly. 

Although the theoretical roots of this technique are very well established, it is more often used as a flexible surface which can be adjusted to lit either exprimental data or data established by better electronic-structure methods. The LEPS formalism has also been extensively used to explore the relationships between the potential energy surface and the details of chemical dynamics . Because of the widespread use of this potential for studying gas-phase reactions, the specific form of the equations will not be discussed here. The interested reader is instead referred to references which discuss this approach in more detail . ... 

It is prerequisite to define localized, diabatic state wave fimctions, representing specific Lewis resonance configurations, in a VB-like method. Although this can in principle be done using an orbital localization technique, the difficulty is that these localization methods not only include orthorgonalization tails, but also include delocalization tails, which make contribution to the electronic delocalization effect and are not appropriate to describe diabatic potential energy surfaces. We have proposed to construct the locahzed diabatic state, or Lewis resonance structure, using a strictly block-localized wave function (BLW) method, which was developed recently for the study of electronic delocalization within a molecule.(28-3 1)... 

The import of diabatic electronic states for dynamical treatments of conical intersecting BO potential energy surfaces is well acknowledged. This intersection is characterized by the non-existence of symmetry element determining its location in nuclear space [25]. This problem is absent in the GED approach. Because the symmetries of the cis and trans conformer are irreducible to each other, a regularization method without a correct reaction coordinate does not make sense. The slope at the (conic) intersection is well defined in the GED scheme. Observe, however, that for closed shell structures, the direct coupling of both states is zero. A configuration interaction is necessary to obtain an appropriate description in other words, correlation states such as diradical ones and the full excited BB state in the AA local minimum cannot be left out the scheme. 

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