The importance of rare earth elements is growing in many areas, especially chemical catalysis, 1,2 metallurgy 3 and industrial field.4 Accordingly, gas-phase reactions of various organic compounds with lanthanide cations have been extensively investigated by spectroscopic experiments 5-10 and computational studies [11][12][13]
20,21In addition, the intersystem crossing (ISC) point is estimated by the single-point energy calculations along the reaction pathway. These results correlated to the recent experimental findings.
7,15We calculated the doublet and quartet PESs for the ionmolecule reaction of Ce + with H 2 O using DFT method, since these two states are very close in energy and may interconvert during the reaction. All molecular structures of the reaction species (reactants, intermediates, products, and transition states) were fully optimized using PBE0 hybrid DFT functional, 22 which are frequently used and gives reasonable results for lanthanide molecular systems.23-25 The unrestricted formalism (UPBE0) was used for all spin states. In particular, an open shell structure was used for the singlet spin states. We used the relativistic effective core potential (RECP) to treat the scalar relativistic effect for the lanthanide ion, Ce + . The small-core Stuttgart ECP28MWB 26,27 with the large atomic natural orbital (ANO) valence basis set ([6s6p5d4f 3g]) and 6-311++G(d,p) basis sets were used for the lanthanide ion (Ce + ) and other atoms (H and O), respectively. We also carried out the harmonic vibrational frequency calculation. All transition states were identified by one imaginary frequency and confirmed by using the intrinsic reaction coordinate (IRC) method.28,29 All relative energies included the zero-point energy (ZPE) correction for all reaction species. We also used the natural population analysis (NPA) 30 for characterizing atomic charge and electronic structure. All calculations were carried out using the Gaussian 03 program.
31All optimized geometries of both doublet and quartet spin states and the reaction PESs regarding to the reactions of Ce + with H 2 O are shown in Figures 1 and 2, respectively. The initiation step of the reaction is the association complex formation in both spin states. As shown in Figure 1, Ce + moves toward the electron rich oxygen atom of the water to form an initial intermediate, IM 1 in both spin states. This result can be readily expected due to the electronegativity of