DFT and CASPT2 study of two thermal reactions of nitromethane: C–N bond cleavage and nitro-to-nitrite isomerization. An example of the inverse symmetry breaking deficiency in density functional calculations of an homolytic dissociation

The reaction paths of nitromethane leading to the dissociation products or isomerization to methyl nitrite have been computationally investigated at the CAS-SCF and DFT levels of theory. Additionally, the CAS-SCF wave functions were used as reference in a second-order perturbation treatment, CASPT2, in order to obtain a good estimate for the activation energy of each reaction path. Both methods predict the isomerization as a concerted reaction. However, the behavior of the two approximations with respect to dissociation is rather different; while CASPT2 predicts a barrier height of (≈59 kcal/mol) in good accordance with the experimental activation energy (59.0 kcal/mol), B3-LYP/6-31G^* calculations overestimate the barrier for more than 30 kcal/mol. The DFT prediction of the dissociation channel exhibits inverse symmetry breaking, dissociating to the unphysical absurd CH₃^δ+ plus NO₂^δ−.