Three-dimensional potential energy surfaces of ArNO (X̃ 2Π)

J Chem Phys. 2020 Mar 21;152(11):114302. doi: 10.1063/1.5145011.

Abstract

Until now, the potential energy surfaces (PESs) of the ArNO complex found in the literature were two-dimensional, with the NO interatomic distance being fixed. In this work, we present the first accurate three-dimensional ground state X̃ 2Π PESs (both A' and A″) of ArNO computed at the CCSD(T)/CBS level of theory. The equilibrium geometries and the well depths (De) are compared to several other electronic structure methods. We found that using the multireference method, MRCI-F12 makes the surfaces much shallower (by 25%) and the depth of the surfaces does not agree with experimental data. The explicitly correlated coupled-cluster method underestimates the well depth as well. Analytic representations for both A' and A″ surfaces were fit to 4380 ab initio points to within 2.71 cm-1. A three-dimensional Numerov propagator method in Delves coordinates is used to compute the bound state spectrum up to Jtot = 6.5. The recommended dissociation energies are D0 = 97.2 cm-1 for the adiabatic ground state and De = 133.7 (128.1) cm-1 for A' (A″).