Gas phase reaction kinetics of complex organic molecules at temperatures of the interstellar medium: The OH + CH 3 OH case

Fundamental Invariant Neural Network (FI-NN) Potential Energy Surface for the OH + CH3OH Reaction with Analytical Forces

The hydrogen abstraction reaction of OH + CH3OH plays a great role in combustion and atmospheric and interstellar chemistry and has been extensively studied theoretically and experimentally. Theoretically, the numerical gradients with respect to the Cartesian coordinates of atoms in molecular simulations on our recent potential energy surface (PES) for the title reaction trained using the permutationally invariant polynomial neural network (PIP-NN) approach hinder the extensive calculation because of the unaffordable computation cost. To address this issue, we in this work report a new full-dimensional accurate analytical PES for the title reaction using the fundamental invariant neural network (FI-NN) approach based on 140,192 points of the quality UCCSD(T)-F12a/AVTZ. Besides, the spin-orbit (SO) corrections of OH in the entrance channel were determined at the level of complete active space self-consistent field with the AVTZ basis set. As a compromise between computational cost and efficiency, the Δ-machine learning approach was employed to construct the SO-corrected PES. Based on this new FI-NN PES with analytical forces, thermal rate coefficients and various dynamic properties, including the integral cross sections, the differential cross sections, and the product energy partitioning, were determined by running a total of 5.5 million trajectories. The use of analytical gradients of the FI-NN PES accelerated simulations and about 99% of computation cost was saved, compared to that for the PIP-NN PES with numerical gradients. Such a significant acceleration is achieved mainly by replacing PIPs with FIs.

Low-temperature reaction dynamics of paramagnetic species in the gas phase

Radicals are abundant in a range of important gas-phase environments. They are prevalent in the atmosphere, in interstellar space, and in combustion processes. As such, understanding how radicals react is essential for the development of accurate models of the complex chemistry occurring in these gas-phase environments. By controlling the properties of the colliding reactants, we can also gain insights into how radical reactions occur on a fundamental level. Recent years have seen remarkable advances in the breadth of experimental methods successfully applied to the study of reaction dynamics involving paramagnetic species-from improvements to the well-known crossed molecular beams approach to newer techniques involving magnetically guided and decelerated beams. Coupled with ever-improving theoretical methods, quantum features are being observed and interesting insights into reaction dynamics are being uncovered in an increasingly diverse range of systems. In this highlight article, we explore some of the exciting recent developments in the study of chemical dynamics involving paramagnetic species. We focus on low-energy reactive collisions involving neutral radical species, where the reaction parameters are controlled. We conclude by identifying some of the limitations of current methods and exploring possible new directions for the field.

Probing the Exit Channel of the OH + CH3OH → H2O + CH3O Reaction by Photodetachment of CH3O-(H2O)

Transition state dynamics of bimolecular reactions can be probed by photodetachment of a precursor anion when the Franck-Condon region of the corresponding neutral potential energy surface is near a saddle point. In this study, photodetachment of anions at m/z = 49 enabled investigation of the exit channel of the OH + CH₃OH → H₂O + CH₃O reaction using photoelectron-photofragment coincidence spectroscopy. High-level coupled-cluster calculations of the stationary points on the anion surface show that the methoxide-water cluster CH₃O^-(H₂O) is the stable minimum on the anion surface. Photodetachment at a 3.20 eV photon energy leads to long-lived H₂O(CH₃O) complexes and H₂O + CH₃O products consistent with both direct dissociative photodetachment and resonance mediated processes on the neutral surface. The partitioning of total kinetic energy in the system indicates that water stretch and bend excitation is induced in dissociative photodetachment and evidence for long-lived complexes consistent with vibrational Feshbach resonances is reported.

Microcanonical Tunneling Rates from Density-of-States Instanton Theory

Semiclassical instanton theory is a form of quantum transition-state theory which can be applied to the computation of thermal reaction rates in complex molecular systems including quantum tunneling effects. There have been a number of attempts to extend the theory to treat microcanonical rates. However, the previous formulations are either computationally unfeasible for large systems due to an explicit sum over states or they involve extra approximations, which make them less reliable. We propose a robust and practical microcanonical formulation called density-of-states instanton theory, which avoids the sum over states altogether. In line with the semiclassical approximations inherent to the instanton approach, we employ the stationary-phase approximation to the inverse Laplace transform to obtain the densities of states. This can be evaluated using only post-processing of the data available from a small set of instanton calculations, such that our approach remains computationally efficient. We show that the new formulation predicts results that agree well with quantum scattering theory for an atom-diatom reaction and with experiments for a photoexcited unimolecular hydrogen transfer in a Criegee intermediate. When the thermal rate is evaluated from a Boltzmann average over our new microcanonical formalism, it can overcome some problems of conventional instanton theory. In particular, it predicts a smooth transition at the crossover temperature and is able to describe bimolecular reactions with pre-reactive complexes such as CH₃OH + OH.