Toward spectroscopically accurate global ab initio potential energy surface for the acetylene-vinylidene isomerization

A new full-dimensional global potential energy surface (PES) for the acetylene-vinylidene isomerization on the ground (S-0) electronic state has been constructed by fitting similar to 37 000 high-level ab initio points using the permutation invariant polynomial-neural network method with a root mean square error of 9.54 cm(-1). The geometries and harmonic vibrational frequencies of acetylene, vinylidene, and all other stationary points (two distinct transition states and one secondary minimum in between) have been determined on this PES. Furthermore, acetylene vibrational energy levels have been calculated using the Lanczos algorithm with an exact (J = 0) Hamiltonian. The vibrational energies up to 12 700 cm(-1) above the zero-point energy are in excellent agreement with the experimentally derived effective Hamiltonians, suggesting that the PES is approaching spectroscopic accuracy. In addition, analyses of the wavefunctions confirm the experimentally observed emergence of the local bending and counter-rotational modes in the highly excited bending vibrational states. The reproduction of the experimentally derived effective Hamiltonians for highly excited bending states signals the coming of age for the ab initio based PES, which can now be trusted for studying the isomerization reaction. (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.