Ab Initio Free-Energy Surfaces for Coupled Ion-Electron Transfer

Although coupled ion-electron transfer (CIET) has emerged as a powerful framework to rationalize the kinetics of Faradaic reactions, its mechanism has lacked a fully microscopic, first-principles description. Here we show that the coupling of electron transfer to ion transfer can be understood as an extension of Marcus theory in which the ensemble of diabatic nuclear configurations is conditioned on a classical collective variable describing the interfacial anisotropy. This formalism enables direct construction of the CIET free-energy surface from constrained ab initio trajectories, providing a first-principles route to electrochemical current-overpotential relations. We demonstrate this method for CO_{2} redox on a gold electrode and find that the resulting two-dimensional saddle-point barriers differ substantially from one-dimensional treatments that consider only electron- or ion-transfer coordinates individually.