Surfaces semiempirical quantum-chemistry

In recent years, there have been many attempts to combine the best of both worlds. Continuum solvent models (reaction field and variations thereof) are very popular now in quantum chemistry but they do not solve all problems, since the environment is treated in a static mean-field approximation. The Car-Parrinello method has found its way into chemistry and it is probably the most rigorous of the methods presently feasible. However, its computational cost allows only the study of systems of a few dozen atoms for periods of a few dozen picoseconds. Semiempirical cluster calculations on chromophores in solvent structures obtained from classical Monte Carlo calculations are discussed in the contribution of Coutinho and Canuto in this volume. In the present article, we describe our attempts with so-called hybrid or quantum-mechanical/molecular-mechanical (QM/MM) methods. These concentrate on the part of the system which is of primary interest (the reactants or the electronically excited solute, say) and treat it by semiempirical quantum chemistry. The rest of the system (solvent, surface, outer part of enzyme) is described by a classical force field. With this, we hope to incorporate the essential influence of the in itself uninteresting environment on the dynamics of the primary system. The approach lacks the rigour of the Car-Parrinello scheme but it allows us to surround a primary system of up to a few dozen atoms by an environment of several ten thousand atoms and run the whole system for several hundred thousand time steps which is equivalent to several hundred picoseconds. 

Chemical dynamics is the link between the potential energy surface (PES) (or surfaces) and an observable chemical phenomena. In principle the PES comes from an ab initio quantum chemistry calculation (within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation) though in practice it is often constructed by some more approximate model, e.g., semiempirical quantum chemistry or totally empirical force field models. First a brief overview of the present state of the methodology and scope of applications in this area is given. We will concentrate on chemical dynamics in the gas phase, though much of the methodology of this field has carried over to the study of dynamical processes in condensed phases, gas-surface collision processes, and also dynamics in biomolecular systems. 

Chapter 1 outlined the tools that computational chemists have at their disposal, Chapter 2 set the stage for the application of these tools to the exploration of potential energy surfaces, and Chapter 3 introduced one of these tools, molecular mechanics. In this chapter you will be introduced to quantum mechanics, and to quantum chemistry, the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry. Molecular mechanics is based on classical physics, physics before modern physics one of the cornerstones of modem physics is quantum mechanics, and ab initio (Chapter 5), semiempirical (Chapter 6), and density functional (Chapter 7) methods belong to quantum chemistry. This chapter is designed to ease the way to an understanding of... 

To conclude this section, it should be noted that the calculations of the potential energy surfaces for heterogeneous catalytic reactions, even by semiempirical methods, still remain a matter for the future. Insufficient accuracy of the semiempirical methods, the approximate nature of cluster modeling, the large volume of a configurational space, a variety of possible reaction paths, etc., considerably restrict the utility of quantum chemistry as applied to this field. There is, however, no doubt that these difficulties will be successfully overcome. The value of conclusive quantum-chemical calculations can hardly be overestimated. They are able to answer questions which the most sophisticated and refined experiments would fail to answer. 

In the section given the electronic stracture has been considered by the semiempirical methods of quantum chemistry (PM3 [138]) of a row of clusters simulated for the most typical section of the surface of hydroxylated, completely trimethylsUylated silica, and also of silicas with the variable amount of hydroxyl and trimethylsilyl (TMS) groups. The initial unmodified surface of hydroxylated silica was performed with adsorption cluster of Si2i056(0H)i2(Si )24 (cluster 0) with the structure relative to face (111) of /3-crystobalite. The foliowii structural parameters were used R(Si—OH) = 1.746 A, R(SiO—Si(CH3)3) = 1.789 A, R(Si—C) = 1.873 A,... 

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