Dissociation of carbonic acid: Gas phase energetics and mechanism from ab initio metadynamics simulations

Abstract

A comprehensive metadynamics study of the energetics, stability, conformational changes, and mechanism of dissociation of gas phase carbonic acid, H2CO3, yields significant new insight into these reactions. The equilibrium geometries, vibrational frequencies, and conformer energies calculated using the density functional theory are in good agreement with the previous theoretical predictions. At 315 K, the cis-cis conformer has a very short life time and transforms easily to the cis-trans conformer through a change in the O=C-O-H dihedral angle. The energy difference between the trans-trans and cis-trans conformers is very small (approximately 1 kcal/mol), but the trans-trans conformer is resistant to dissociation to carbon dioxide and water. The cis-trans conformer has a relatively short path for one of its hydroxyl groups to accept the proton from the other end of the molecule, resulting in a lower activation barrier for dissociation. Comparison of the free and potential energies of dissociation shows that the entropic contribution to the dissociation energy is less than 10%. The potential energy barrier for dissociation of H2CO3 to CO2 and H2O from the metadynamics calculations is 5-6 kcal/mol lower than in previous 0 K studies, possibly due to a combination of a finite temperature and more efficient sampling of the energy landscape in the metadynamics calculations. Gas phase carbonic acid dissociation is triggered by the dehydroxylation of one of the hydroxyl groups, which reorients as it approaches the proton on the other end of the molecule, thus facilitating a favorable H-O-H angle for the formation of a product H2O molecule. The major atomic reorganization of the other part of the molecule is a gradual straightening of the O=C=O bond. The metadynamics results provide a basis for future simulation of the more challenging carbonic acid-water system.

Matrix Isolation Studies of Carbonic Acid—The Vapor Phase above the β-Polymorph

“…The presence of the two weak internal hydrogen bonds in the C 2 v monomer compared to the single internal hydrogen bond in the C s monomer results in an increased stability of about 4–8 kJ/mol. 22,28,29,38−41 This interpretation of the presence of these two monomers at these ratios can also be deduced from all other spectral ranges shown in Figure 3 and is demonstrated in the Supporting Information.…”

Quantum chemical calculation on the potential energy surface of H2CO3 and its implication for martian chemistry

“…The isolated carbonic acid is thus kinetically stable (Loerting et al, 2000). The barrier for dissociation of carbonic acid to form water and carbon dioxide was estimated to be about 50 kcal mol À1 (Mori et al, 2009;Wight and Boldyrev, 1995;Kumar et al, 2007). However this barrier becomes much lower with water catalyzed (Nguyen et al, 2008).…”

Well-Tempered Metadynamics: A Smoothly Converging and Tunable Free-Energy Method

“…We shall focus here on metadynamics [6], which has proven its effectiveness in a variety of contexts [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. In metadynamics the system evolution is biased by a history-dependent potential that is constructed as the sum of Gaussian functions [19] deposited along the trajectory in the CVs space.…”