Theoretical investigation of the dissociation dynamics of vibrationally excited vinyl bromide on an ab initio potential-energy surface obtained using modified novelty sampling and feed-forward neural networks

The reaction dynamics of vibrationally excited vinyl bromide have been investigated using classical trajectory methods on a neural network potential surface that is fitted to an ab initio database of 12 122 configuration energies obtained from electronic structure calculations conducted at the MP4(SDQ) level of theory using a 6-31G(d,p) basis set for the carbon and hydrogen atoms and Huzinaga's (43334334) basis set augmented with split outer s and p orbitals (4332143214) and a polarization f orbital with an exponent of 0.5 for the bromine atom. The sampling of the 12-dimensional configuration hyperspace of vinyl bromide prior to execution of the electronic structure calculations is accomplished by combining novelty-sampling methods, chemical intuition, and trajectory sampling on empirical and neural network surfaces. The final potential is obtained using a two-layer feed-forward neural network comprising 38 and 1 neurons, respectively, with hyperbolic tangent sigmoid and linear transfer functions in the hidden and output layers, respectively. The fitting is accomplished using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm with early stopping and Bayesian regularization methods to avoid overfitting. The interpolated potentials have a standard deviation from the ab initio results of 0.0578 eV, which is within the range generally regarded as "chemical accuracy" for the purposes of electronic structure calculations. It is shown that the potential surface may be easily and conveniently transferred from one research group to another. The files required for transfer of the vinyl bromide surface can be obtained from the Electronic Physics Auxiliary Publication Service. Total dissociation rate coefficients for vinyl bromide are obtained at five different excitation energies between 4.50 and 6.44 eV. Branching ratios into each of the six open reaction channels are computed at 24 vibrational energies in the range between 4.00 and 6.44 eV. The distribution of vibrational energies in HBr formed via three-center dissociation from vinyl bromide is determined and compared with previous theoretical and experimental results. It is concluded that the combination of ab initio electronic structure calculations, novelty sampling with chemical intuition and trajectories on empirical analytic surfaces, and feed-forward neural networks provides a viable framework in which to execute purely ab initio molecular-dynamics studies on complex systems with multiple open reaction channels.