New Approach for Investigating Reaction Dynamics and Rates with Ab Initio Calculations

Herein, we demonstrate a convenient approach to systematically investigate chemical reaction dynamics using the metadynamics (MetaD) family of enhanced sampling methods. Using a symmetric SN2 reaction as a model system, we applied infrequent metadynamics, a theoretical framework based on acceleration factors, to quantitatively estimate the rate of reaction from biased and unbiased simulations. A systematic study of the algorithm and its application to chemical reactions was performed by sampling over 5000 independent reaction events. Additionally, we quantitatively reweighed exhaustive free-energy calculations to obtain the reaction potential-energy surface and showed that infrequent metadynamics works to effectively determine Arrhenius-like activation energies. Exact agreement with unbiased high-temperature kinetics is also shown. The feasibility of using the approach on actual ab initio molecular dynamics calculations is then presented by using Car-Parrinello MD+MetaD to sample the same reaction using only 10-20 calculations of the rare event. Owing to the ease of use and comparatively low-cost of computation, the approach has extensive potential applications for catalysis, combustion, pyrolysis, and enzymology.