Quantum chemical study of reaction mechanism between plutonium and nitrogen

Abstract

The study of the reaction between plutonium and nitrogen is helpful to further understand the interaction between plutonium and air gas molecules. For the nitridation reaction of plutonium, there is no report on the microscopic reaction mechanism of this system at present. Therefore, the microcospic mechanism of gas phase reaction of Pu with N2 is studied in this paper based on the density functional theory (DFT) using different functions. In this paper, the geometry of stationary points on the potential energy surface is optimized. In addition, the transition states are verified by the frequency analysis method and the intrinsic reaction coordinate (IRC) method. Finally, we obtain the reaction potential energy curve and the micro reaction pathways. The analysis of reaction mechanism shows that the reaction of Pu with N2 has two pathways. The pathway-1 (Pu+N2→R1→TS1→PuN2) has a T-shaped transition state and the pathway-2 (Pu+N2→R2→TS2→PuN+N) has a L-shaped transition state. Moreover, both transition states have only one virtual frequency. The energy analysis shows that pathway-1 is the main reaction pathway. The nature of the Pu-N bonding evolution along the pathways is studied by atoms in molecules (AIM) and electron localization function (ELF) topological approaches. In order to analyse the role of 5f orbital of plutonium atom in the reaction, the variation of density of state along the pathways is performed. The results show that the 5f orbital makes major contributions to the formation of Pu-N bonds. Meanwhile, the influence of different temperatures on the reaction rate is revealed by calculating the rate constants of the two reaction pathways.