SN2 reactions as two-state problems: diabatic MO-CI calculations on lithium (Li3-, Li2H-) and chlorine (Cl3-, ClCH3Cl-)

Solvent Effect on the Potential Energy Surfaces of the F- + CH3CH2Br Reaction

Although substantial work has been undertaken on reaction pathways involved in base-promoted elimination reactions and bimolecular nucleophilic substitution reaction of F^- on CH₃CH₂X (X = Cl, Br, I), the effect of solvents with varying dielectric constants on the stereochemistry of each of the reaction species involved across the reaction profile have not yet been clearly understood. The present investigation reports the effect of solvents on the potential energy surfaces (PES) and structures of the species appearing in the reaction pathway of F^- with bromoethane. The PESs in the gas phase have been computed at MP2 level and CCSD(T) level. The performance of several hybrid density functional, such as B3LYP, M06, M06L, BHandH, X3LYP, M05, M05-2X, and M06-2X have also been investigated toward describing the elimination and nucleophilic substitution reactions. With respect to MAE values and to make the computation cost-effective, we have explored the implicit continuum solvent model, CPCM in solvents like cyclohexane, methanol, acetonitrile, dimethyl sulfoxide and water. The reactant complexes proceed through the subsequent steps to produce fluoroethane as the substitution product and ethylene as one of the elimination products. For elimination reaction both syn and anti elimination have been explored. The calculated relatives energies values, which are negative in the gas phase, are found to be positive in polar solvents since the point charge in the separated reactants are more stabilized than the dispersed charge in the transient complex, which has also been analyzed through NBO analysis.

Chemical bonding: the orthogonal valence-bond view

Chemical bonding is the stabilization of a molecular system by charge- and spin-reorganization processes in chemical reactions. These processes are said to be local, because the number of atoms involved is very small. With multi-configurational self-consistent field (MCSCF) wave functions, these processes can be calculated, but the local information is hidden by the delocalized molecular orbitals (MO) used to construct the wave functions. The transformation of such wave functions into valence bond (VB) wave functions, which are based on localized orbitals, reveals the hidden information; this transformation is called a VB reading of MCSCF wave functions. The two-electron VB wave functions describing the Lewis electron pair that connects two atoms are frequently called covalent or neutral, suggesting that these wave functions describe an electronic situation where two electrons are never located at the same atom; such electronic situations and the wave functions describing them are called ionic. When the distance between two atoms decreases, however, every covalent VB wave function composed of non-orthogonal atomic orbitals changes its character from neutral to ionic. However, this change in the character of conventional VB wave functions is hidden by its mathematical form. Orthogonal VB wave functions composed of orthonormalized orbitals never change their character. When localized fragment orbitals are used instead of atomic orbitals, one can decide which local information is revealed and which remains hidden. In this paper, we analyze four chemical reactions by transforming the MCSCF wave functions into orthogonal VB wave functions; we show how the reactions are influenced by changing the atoms involved or by changing their local symmetry. Using orthogonal instead of non-orthogonal orbitals is not just a technical issue; it also changes the interpretation, revealing the properties of wave functions that remain otherwise undetected.

Perspective on Diabatic Models of Chemical Reactivity as Illustrated by the Gas-Phase S(N)2 Reaction of Acetate Ion with 1,2-Dichloroethane

Diabatic models are widely employed for studying chemical reactivity in condensed phases and enzymes, but there has been little discussion of the pros and cons of various diabatic representations for this purpose. Here we discuss and contrast six different schemes for computing diabatic potentials for a charge rearrangement reaction. They include (i) the variational diabatic configurations (VDC) constructed by variationally optimizing individual valence bond structures and (ii) the consistent diabatic configurations (CDC) obtained by variationally optimizing the ground-state adiabatic energy, both in the nonorthogonal molecular orbital valence bond (MOVB) method, along with the orthogonalized (iii) VDC-MOVB and (iv) CDC-MOVB models. In addition, we consider (v) the fourfold way (based on diabatic molecular orbitals and configuration uniformity), and (vi) empirical valence bond (EVB) theory. To make the considerations concrete, we calculate diabatic electronic states and diabatic potential energies along the reaction path that connects the reactant and the product ion-molecule complexes of the gas-phase bimolecular nucleophilic substitution (S(N)2) reaction of 1,2-dichloethane (DCE) with acetate ion, which is a model reaction corresponding to the reaction catalyzed by haloalkane dehalogenase. We utilize ab initio block-localized molecular orbital theory to construct the MOVB diabatic states and ab initio multi-configuration quasidegenerate perturbation theory to construct the fourfold-way diabatic states; the latter are calculated at reaction path geometries obtained with the M06-2X density functional. The EVB diabatic states are computed with parameters taken from the literature. The MOVB and fourfold-way adiabatic and diabatic potential energy profiles along the reaction path are in qualitative but not quantitative agreement with each other. In order to validate that these wave-function-based diabatic states are qualitatively correct, we show that the reaction energy and barrier for the adiabatic ground state, obtained with these methods, agree reasonably well with the results of high-level calculations using the composite G3SX and G3SX(MP3) methods and the BMC-CCSD multi-coefficient correlation method. However, a comparison of the EVB gas-phase adiabatic ground-state reaction path with those obtained from MOVB and with the fourfold way reveals that the EVB reaction path geometries show a systematic shift towards the products region, and that the EVB lowest-energy path has a much lower barrier. The free energies of solvation and activation energy in water reported from dynamical calculations based on EVB also imply a low activation barrier in the gas phase. In addition, calculations of the free energy of solvation using the recently proposed SM8 continuum solvation model with CM4M partial atomic charges lead to an activation barrier in reasonable agreement with experiment only when the geometries and the gas-phase barrier are those obtained from electronic structure calculations, i.e., methods i-v. These comparisons show the danger of basing the diabatic states on molecular mechanics without the explicit calculation of electronic wave functions. Furthermore, comparison of schemes i-v with one another shows that significantly different quantitative results can be obtained by using different methods for extracting diabatic states from wave function calculations, and it is important for each user to justify the choice of diabatization method in the context of its intended use.