Semiclassical reaction rate constant of non-adiabatic system by means of initial value representation

Abstract

We applied the semiclassical initial value representation (SC-IVR) method with the classical electron analog to deal with electronically non-adiabatic reactive barriers and calculated the thermal reaction rate constant. The symmetric form of the flux–flux correlation function is used, and the matrix element of the Boltzmannized flux operator is derived using imaginary-time path integral techniques. This combined use of non-adiabatic SC-IVR and non-adiabatic path-integral sampling (NA-IVR&PI) is beyond the treatment of mean-field, and we analyze its performance in comparison with some existing mean-field methods for different scenarios of potential energy surface. We found a systematically better performance. One exception is the deep tunneling regime, where the mean-field ring-polymer instanton is superior. In the golden rule limit, where all these mean-field methods break down, the significant advantage of NA-IVR&PI is shown by using the electronic states for description of the dividing surface.