ZHONGHUA Yu, CONGXIANG CHEN, and MINGBAO HUANG. Can. J. Chem. 71, 512 (1993).The mechanism of the reaction CH(X'T) + CH, has been investigated by ab initio molecular orbital calculations.Addition, insertion, and abstraction-addition reaction paths have been examined by, in total, five methods of approach. The addition reaction path has a rather high energy barrier. Our calculations have implied that the assumed insertion reaction path does not seem to exist for the reaction CH + CH,, and a two-step mechanism (abstraction-addition reaction path) was then proposed. For the abstraction-addition reaction, the reactants, transition state, intermediates, and products were optimized at the HF/3-21G and HF/6-31G" levels, and vibrational frequencies were calculated at the HF/3-21G level. Electronic correlation energy was estimated by means of the M~ller-Plesset perturbation theory and configuration interaction method. The excited-state abstraction reaction was also studied in some detail.