Nonadiabatic Dynamics of 1,3-Cyclohexadiene by Curvature-Driven Coherent Switching with Decay of Mixing

J Chem Theory Comput. 2022 Dec 13;18(12):7073-7081. doi: 10.1021/acs.jctc.2c00801. Epub 2022 Nov 9.

Abstract

The photoinduced ring-opening reaction of 1,3-cyclohexadiene to produce 1,3,5-hexatriene is a classic electrocyclic reaction and is also a prototype for many reactions of biological and synthetic importance. Here, we simulate the ultrafast nonadiabatic dynamics of the reaction in the manifold of the three lowest valence electronic states by using extended multistate complete-active-space second-order perturbation theory (XMS-CASPT2) combined with the curvature-driven coherent switching with decay of mixing (κCSDM) dynamical method. We obtain an excited-state lifetime of 79 fs, and a product quantum yield of 40% from the 500 trajectories initiated in the S1 excited state. The obtained lifetime and quantum yield values are very close to previously reported experimental and computed values, showing the capability of performing a reasonable nonadiabatic ring-opening dynamics with the κCSDM method that does not require nonadiabatic coupling vectors, time derivatives, or diabatization. In addition, we study the ring-opening reaction by initiating the trajectories in the dark state S2. We also optimize the S0/S1 and S1/S2 minimum-energy conical intersections (MECIs) by XMS-CASPT2; for S1/S2, we optimized both an inner and an outer local-minimum-energy conical intersections (LMECIs). We provide the potential energy profile along the ring-opening coordinate by joining selected critical points via linear synchronous transit paths. We find the inner S1/S2 LMECI to be more crucial than the outer one.