No Arabic abstract
A new potential energy surface (PES) and dynamical study are presented of the reactive process between H2CO + OH towards the formation of HCO + H2O and HCOOH + H. In this work a source of spurious long range interactions in symmetry adapted neural network (NN) schemes is identified, what prevents their direct application for low temperature dynamical studies. For this reason, a partition of the PES into a diabatic matrix plus a NN many body term has been used fitted with a novel artificial neural networks scheme that prevents spurious asymptotic interactions. Quasi-classical trajectory and ring polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) studies have been carried on this PES to evaluate the rate constant temperature dependence for the different reactive processes, showing a good agreement with the available experimental data. Of special interest is the analysis of the previously identified trapping mechanism in the RPMD study, which can be attributed to spurious resonances associated to excitations of the normal modes of the ring polymer.
The ring-polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) was used to calculate the thermal rate coefficients of the two-channel roaming reaction H + MgH. Both reaction channels, tight and roaming, are explicitly considered. This is a pioneering attempt of exerting RPMD method to multi-channel reactions. With the help of a newly developed optimization-interpolation protocol for preparing the initial structures and adaptive protocol for choosing the force constants, we have successfully obtained the thermal rate coefficients. The results are consistent with those from other theoretical methods, such as variational transition state theory (VTST) and quantum dynamics (QD). Especially, RPMD results exhibit negative temperature dependence, which is similar to results from VTST but different from ones from ground state QD calculations.
We apply Thermostatted Ring Polymer Molecular Dynamics (TRPMD), a recently-proposed approximate quantum dynamics method, to the computation of thermal reaction rates. Its short-time Transition-State Theory (TST) limit is identical to rigorous Quantum Transition-State Theory, and we find that its long-time limit is independent of the location of the dividing surface. TRPMD rate theory is then applied to one-dimensional model systems, the atom-diatom bimolecular reactions H+H$_2$, D+MuH and F+H$_2$, and the prototypical polyatomic reaction H+CH$_4$. Above the crossover temperature, the TRPMD rate is virtually invariant to the strength of the friction applied to the internal ring-polymer normal modes, and beneath the crossover temperature the TRPMD rate generally decreases with increasing friction, in agreement with the predictions of Kramers theory. We therefore find that TRPMD is approximately equal to, or less accurate than, Ring Polymer Molecular Dynamics (RPMD) for symmetric reactions, and for certain asymmetric systems and friction parameters closer to the quantum result, providing a basis for further assessment of the accuracy of this method.
Two of the most successful methods that are presently available for simulating the quantum dynamics of condensed phase systems are centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) and ring polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD). Despite their conceptual differences, practical implementations of these methods differ in just two respects: the choice of the Parrinello-Rahman mass matrix and whether or not a thermostat is applied to the internal modes of the ring polymer during the dynamics. Here we explore a method which is halfway between the two approximations: we keep the path integral bead masses equal to the physical particle masses but attach a Langevin thermostat to the internal modes of the ring polymer during the dynamics. We justify this by showing analytically that the inclusion of an internal mode thermostat does not affect any of the desirable features of RPMD: thermostatted RPMD (TRPMD) is equally valid with respect to everything that has actually been proven about the method as RPMD itself. In particular, because of the choice of bead masses, the resulting method is still optimum in the short-time limit, and the transition state approximation to its reaction rate theory remains closely related to the semiclassical instanton approximation in the deep quantum tunneling regime. In effect, there is a continuous family of methods with these properties, parameterised by the strength of the Langevin friction. Here we explore numerically how the approximation to quantum dynamics depends on this friction, with a particular emphasis on vibrational spectroscopy. We find that a broad range of frictions approaching optimal damping give similar results, and that these results are immune to both the resonance problem of RPMD and the curvature problem of CMD.
In this study, we analyze how changes in the geometry of a potential energy surface in terms of depth and flatness can affect the reaction dynamics. We formulate depth and flatness in the context of one and two degree-of-freedom (DOF) Hamiltonian normal form for the saddle-node bifurcation and quantify their influence on chemical reaction dynamics. In a recent work, Garcia-Garrido, Naik, and Wiggins illustrated how changing the well-depth of a potential energy surface (PES) can lead to a saddle-node bifurcation. They have shown how the geometry of cylindrical manifolds associated with the rank-1 saddle changes en route to the saddle-node bifurcation. Using the formulation presented here, we show how changes in the parameters of the potential energy control the depth and flatness and show their role in the quantitative measures of a chemical reaction. We quantify this role of the depth and flatness by calculating the ratio of the bottleneck-width and well-width, reaction probability (also known as transition fraction or population fraction), gap time (or first passage time) distribution, and directional flux through the dividing surface (DS) for small to high values of total energy. The results obtained for these quantitative measures are in agreement with the qualitative understanding of the reaction dynamics.
We present a new non-adiabatic ring polymer molecular dynamics (NRPMD) method based on the spin mapping formalism, which we refer to as the spin-mapping NRPMD (SM-NRPMD) approach. We derive the path-integral partition function expression using the spin coherent state basis for the electronic states and the ring polymer formalism for the nuclear degrees of freedom (DOFs). This partition function provides an efficient sampling of the quantum statistics. Using the basic property of the Stratonovich-Weyl transformation, we derive a Hamiltonian which we propose for the dynamical propagation of the coupled spin mapping variables and the nuclear ring polymer. The accuracy of the SM-NRPMD method is numerically demonstrated by computing nuclear position and population auto-correlation functions of non-adiabatic model systems. The results from SM-NRPMD agree very well with the numerically exact results. The main advantage of using the spin mapping variables over the harmonic oscillator mapping variables is numerically demonstrated, where the former provides nearly time-independent expectation values of physical observables for systems under thermal equilibrium, the latter can not preserve the initial quantum Boltzmann distribution. We also explicitly demonstrate that SM-NRPMD provides invariant dynamics upon various ways of partitioning the state-dependent and state-independent potentials.