Photofragmentation of cyclobutanone at 200 nm: TDDFT vs CASSCF electron diffraction

To simulate a 200 nm photoexcitation in cyclobutanone to the n-3s Rydberg state, classical trajectories were excited from a Wigner distribution to the singlet state manifold based on excitation energies and oscillator strengths. Twelve singlet and 12 triplet states are treated using TD-B3LYP-D3/6-31+G** for the electronic structure, and the nuclei are propagated with the Tully surface hopping method. Using time-dependent density functional theory, we are able to predict the bond cleavage that takes place on the S1 surface as well as the ultrafast deactivation from the Rydberg n-3s state to the nπ*. After showing that triplet states and higher-lying singlet states do not play any crucial role during the early dynamics (i.e., the first 300 fs), the SA(6)-CASSCF(8,11)/aug-cc-pVDZ method is used as an electronic structure and the outcome of the non-adiabatic dynamic simulations is recomputed. Gas-phase ultrafast electron diffraction spectra are computed for both electronic structure methods, showing significantly different results.