Beyond Born-Oppenheimer constructed diabatic potential energy surfaces for F + H2 reaction.

TLDR: The newly calculated diabatic PESs are found to be smooth, single-valued, continuous, and symmetric and can be invoked for performing accurate scattering calculations on the F + H2 system.

Abstract: First principles based beyond Born–Oppenheimer theory has been implemented on the F + H2 system for constructing multistate global diabatic Potential Energy Surfaces (PESs) through the incorporation of Nonadiabatic Coupling Terms (NACTs) explicitly. The spin–orbit (SO) coupling effect on the collision process of the F + H2 reaction has been included as a perturbation to the non-relativistic electronic Hamiltonian. Adiabatic PESs and NACTs for the lowest three electronic states (12A′, 22A′, and 12A″) are determined in hyperspherical coordinates as functions of hyperangles for a grid of fixed values of the hyperradius. Jahn–Teller (JT) type conical intersections between the two A′ states translate along C2v and linear geometries in F + H2. In addition, A′ and A″ states undergo Renner–Teller (RT) interaction at collinear configurations of this system. Both JT and RT couplings are validated by integrating NACTs along properly chosen contours. Subsequently, we have solved adiabatic-to-diabatic transformation (ADT) equations to evaluate the ADT angles for constructing the diabatic potential matrix of F + H2, including the SO coupling terms. The newly calculated diabatic PESs are found to be smooth, single-valued, continuous, and symmetric and can be invoked for performing accurate scattering calculations on the F + H2 system.