Quasiclassical trajectory study of the Cl+CH4 reaction dynamics on a quadratic configuration interaction with single and double excitation interpolated potential energy surface

An ab initio interpolated potential energy surface (PES) for the Cl+CH4 reactive system has been constructed using the interpolation method of Collins and co-workers [J. Chem. Phys. 102, 5647 (1995); 108, 8302 (1998); 111, 816 (1999); Theor. Chem. Acc. 108, 313 (2002)]. The ab initio calculations have been performed using quadratic configuration interaction with single and double excitation theory to build the PES. A simple scaling all correlation technique has been used to obtain a PES which yields a barrier height and reaction energy in good agreement with high level ab initio calculations and experimental measurements. Using these interpolated PESs, a detailed quasiclassical trajectory study of integral and differential cross sections, product rovibrational populations, and internal energy distributions has been carried out for the Cl+CH4 and Cl+CD4 reactions, and the theoretical results have been compared with the available experimental data. It has been shown that the calculated total reaction cross sections versus collision energy for the Cl+CH4 and Cl+CD4 reactions is very sensitive to the barrier height. Besides, due to the zero-point energy (ZPE) leakage of the CH4 molecule to the reaction coordinate in the quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) calculations, the reaction threshold falls below the barrier height of the PES. The ZPE leakage leads to CH3 and HCl coproducts with internal energy below its corresponding ZPEs. We have shown that a Gaussian binning (GB) analysis of the trajectories yields excitation functions in somehow better agreement with the experimental determinations. The HCl(v(')=0) and DCl(v(')=0) rotational distributions are as well very sensitive to the ZPE problem. The GB correction narrows and shifts the rotational distributions to lower values of the rotational quantum numbers. However, the present QCT rotational distributions are still hotter than the experimental distributions. In both reactions the angular distributions shift from backward peaked to sideways peaked as collision energy increases, as seen in the experiments and other theoretical calculations. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.