Herein, we describe the catalytic hydrogenation of CO2 to formate with (PNP)Mn–H (PNP = 2,6-bis(di-tert-butylphosphinomethyl)pyridine; Mn = Mn(CO)2). Contrary to the established mechanism for CO2 hydrogenation, mechanistic studies indicate that CO2 does not insert into the Mn–H bond of (PNP)Mn–H to give the formate species, (PNP)Mn–OCHO. The lack of reactivity is confirmed by thermochemical studies that show that (PNP)Mn–H is not sufficiently hydridic to reduce CO2. Deprotonation of the hydride to give [(*PNP)Mn–H] – (* indicates the deprotonated ligand) enhances the hydricity by ∼17 kcal·mol–1 and hence should be sufficiently hydridic to hydrogenate CO2. This reactivity is not observed, and CO2 instead binds to the backbone to generate another anionic hydride species [(CO 2 -PNP)Mn–H]. The formate is lost only from this species, through hydride transfer to an external CO2. These findings are unexpected because substrate binding to the backbone of catalysts that can undergo metal–ligand cooperativity (MLC) is thought to be detrimental to catalysis; this work suggests that alternative mechanisms should be considered. The enhanced hydricity observed upon deprotonation may be broadly applicable to systems capable of undergoing MLC. Moreover, this work shows an example of how thermochemical analysis can be used to advance mechanistic understanding in (de)hydrogenation catalysis.
Ab initio computer simulations of anharmonic vibrational spectra provide nuanced insight into the vibrational behavior of molecules and complexes. The computational bottleneck in such simulations, particularly for ab initio potentials, is often the generation of mode-coupling potentials. Focusing specifically on two-mode couplings in this analysis, the combination of a local-mode representation and multilevel methods is demonstrated to be particularly symbiotic. In this approach, a low-level quantum chemistry method is employed to predict the pairwise couplings that should be included at the target level of theory in vibrational self-consistent field (and similar) calculations. Pairs that are excluded by this approach are “recycled” at the low level of theory. Furthermore, because this low-level pre-screening will eventually become the computational bottleneck for sufficiently large chemical systems, distance-based truncation is applied to these low-level predictions without substantive loss of accuracy. This combination is demonstrated to yield sub-wavenumber fidelity with reference vibrational transitions when including only a small fraction of target-level couplings; the overhead of predicting these couplings, particularly when employing distance-based, local-mode cutoffs, is a trivial added cost. This combined approach is assessed on a series of test cases, including ethylene, hexatriene, and the alanine dipeptide. Vibrational self-consistent field (VSCF) spectra were obtained with an RI-MP2/cc-pVTZ potential for the dipeptide, at approximately a 5-fold reduction in computational cost. Considerable optimism for increased accelerations for larger systems and higher-order couplings is also justified, based on this investigation.
The ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) method provides a computational route for the real-time simulation of reactive chemistry. An often-overlooked capability of this approach is the opportunity to examine the electronic evolution of a chemical system. For AIMD trajectories based on Hartree–Fock or density functional theory methods, the real-time evolution of single-particle molecular orbitals (MOs) can provide detailed insights into the time-dependent electronic structure of molecules. The evolving electronic Hamiltonians at each MD step pose problems for tracking and visualizing a given MO’s character, ordering, and associated phase throughout an MD trajectory, however. This report presents and assesses a simple algorithm for correcting these deficiencies by exploiting similarity projections of the electronic structure between neighboring MD steps. Two aspects bring this analysis beyond a simple step-to-step projection scheme. First, the challenging case of coincidental orbital degeneracies is resolved via a quadrupole-field perturbation that nonetheless rigorously preserves energy conservation. Second, the resulting orbitals are shown to evolve adiabatically, in spite of the “preservation of character” concept that undergirds a projection of neighboring steps’ MOs. The method is tested on water clusters, which exhibit considerable dynamic degeneracies, as well as a classic organic nucleophilic substitution reaction, in which the adiabatic evolution of the bonding orbitals clarifies textbook interpretations of the electronic structure during this reactive collision.
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