Abs efficiently catalyze the conversion of molecular singlet oxygen ( 1 O2) plus water to hydrogen peroxide (HOOH), we used quantum chemical methods (B3LYP density functional theory) to delineate the most plausible mechanisms for the observed efficient conversion of water to HOOH. We find two reasonable pathways. In Pathway I, (i) H2O catalyzes the reaction of 1 O2 with a second water to form HOOOH; (ii) two HOOOH form a dimer, which rearranges to form the HOO-HOOO ؉ H2O complex; (iii) HOO-HOOO rearranges to HOOH-OOO, which subsequently reacts with H2O to form H2O4 ؉ HOOH; and (iv) H2O4 rearranges to the cyclic dimer (HO2)2, which in turn forms HOOH plus 1 O2 or 3 O2. Pathway II differs in that step ii is replaced with the reaction between HOOOH and 1 O2, leading to the formation of HOO-HOOO. This then proceeds to similar products. For a system with 18 The results lead to plausible mechanisms in good agreement with the Scripps isotope experiments. The Discussion talks about these results, suggesting that these mechanisms account for the Scripps Ab results and they may also be significant for understanding related processes in biochemistry, combustion, explosions, atmospheric chemistry, and radiation chemistry of aqueous systems.
Computational DetailsAll QM calculations use the Becke three-parameter hybrid functional with Lee-Yang-Parr correlation functional (B3LYP) flavor of density functional theory (3-7), which includes a generalized gradient approximation and some exact exchange. The 6-31G** basis set (8, 9) was used on all atoms for a full geometry optimization. Vibrational frequencies (from the analytic Hessian) were calculated to ensure that each minimum is a true local minimum (containing only positive frequencies) and that each transition state has only a single imaginary frequency (negative eigenvalue of the Hessian). All QM calculations were carried out with JAGUAR (10-12). Some of these energetics were included in ref. 2.To obtain more accurate energetics, we carried out calculations with the cc-pVTZ basis set (13) by using the optimized geometries from the 6-31G** basis. Such QM calculations lead to an accuracy of around 3 kcal͞mol for simple organic molecules (14).For molecules such as 1 O 2 and O 3 , which have significant open shell character, standard density functional theory methods often lead to much larger errors. Thus, with B3LYP, the singlet and triplet gap for O 2 is ⌬E ( 1 ⌬ g Ϫ 3 ⌺ g Ϫ ) ϭ 10.4 kcal͞mol, in poor agreement with the experimental value of 22.5 kcal͞mol (15). Consequently, we used spin projection techniques (16) to ensure a proper description of the complexes involving 1 O 2 . This leads to ⌬E ( 1 ⌬ g Ϫ 3 ⌺ g Ϫ ) ϭ 20.5 kcal͞mol, in good agreement with experiment.The calculated vibrational frequencies (with no empirical scaling) were used to calculate the zero point energy and temperature corrections so that all energetics are reported for ⌬H (298K), in kcal͞mol.
QM Calculations and Plausible MechanismsFormation of H2O2 from the Reaction Between Two H2O3. First, we examined...