Chemical reaction dynamics are studied to follow and understand the concerted motion of several atoms while they rearrange from reactants to products. With the number of atoms growing, the number of pathways, transition states, and product channels also increases and rapidly presents a challenge to experiment and theory. Here, we disentangle the competition between bimolecular nucleophilic substitution (S N 2) and base-induced elimination (E2) in the polyatomic reaction F - + CH 3 CH 2 Cl. We find quantitative agreement for the energy- and angle-differential reactive scattering cross sections between ion imaging experiments and quasi-classical trajectory simulations on a 21-dimensional potential energy hypersurface. The anti-E2 pathway is most important, but the S N 2 pathway becomes more relevant as the collision energy is increased. In both cases the reaction is dominated by direct dynamics. Our study presents atomic level dynamics of a major benchmark reaction in physical organic chemistry, thereby pushing the number of atoms for detailed reaction dynamics studies to a size that allows applications in many areas of complex chemical networks and environments.

The construction of high-dimensional global potential energy surfaces (PESs) from ab initio data has been a major challenge for decades. Advances in computer hardware, electronic structure theory, and PES fitting methods have greatly alleviated many challenges in PES construction, but building fitting sets has remained a bottleneck so far. We present the ROBOSURFER program system that completely automates the generation of new geometries, performs ab initio computations, and iteratively improves the PES under development. Unlike previous efforts to automate PES development, ROBOSURFER does not require any uncertainty estimate from the PES fitting method and thus it is compatible with the permutationally invariant polynomial (PIP) method. As a demonstration we have developed five related but different global reactive PIP PESs for the CH 3 Br + F − system and used them to perform quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) reaction dynamics simulations over a wide range of collision energies. The automatically developed PESs show good to excellent accuracy at known stationary points without any manual sampling, and QCT results indicate the lack of unphysical minima on the fitted surfaces. We also present evidence suggesting that the breakdown of single reference electronic structure theory may contribute significantly to the fitting errors of global reactive PESs.

Since the pioneering reaction dynamics studies of H + H2 in the 1970s, theory increased the system size by one atom in every decade arriving to six-atom reactions in the early 2010s. Here, we take a significant step forward by reporting accurate dynamics simulations for the nine-atom Cl + ethane (C2H6) reaction using a new high-quality spin–orbit–ground-state ab initio potential energy surface. Quasi-classical trajectory simulations on this surface cool the rotational distribution of the HCl product molecules, thereby providing unprecedented agreement with experiment after several previous failed attempts of theory. Unlike Cl + CH4, the Cl + C2H6 reaction is exothermic with an adiabatically submerged transition state, allowing testing of the validity of the Polanyi rules for a negative-barrier reaction.

We develop the first accurate full-dimensional ab initio PES for the OH− + CH3I SN2 and proton-transfer reactions treating the failure of CCSD(T) at certain geometries.

We review composite ab initio and dynamical methods and their applications to characterize stationary points of atom/ion + molecule reactions.