Kinetics and dynamics study of the H + CCl4 → HCl(v′, j′) + CCl3 reaction

Based on a previous potential energy surface describing the H + CCl4 reaction, a new analytical surface named PES-2010 was developed modifying both the functional form to give it more flexibility, and the calibration process in which exclusively theoretical information was used. Thus, the surface is completely symmetric with respect to the permutation of the four methane chlorine atoms, and no experimental information is used in the process. For the kinetics, the thermal rate constants were calculated using variational transition-state theory with semiclassical transmission coefficients over a wide temperature range, 300–2,500 K. The theoretical results reproduce the experimental variation with temperature. The influence of the tunneling factor is small, since the abstraction reaction involves the motion of a heavy particle (a chlorine atom) that cannot easily tunnel through the reaction barrier. The coupling between the reaction coordinate and the vibrational modes shows qualitatively that the HCl stretching mode in the products appears vibrationally excited. The dynamics study was performed using quasi-classical trajectory calculations, including corrections to avoid the zero-point energy problem. First, we found that the HCl(ν′, j′) product mostly appears with small rotational energy and vibrational population inversion. Second, the state-specific scattering distributions show backward scattering, which becomes more noticeable as the HCl(ν′) vibrational state increases. Unfortunately, no experimental dynamics data are available for the title reaction, but the comparison with the kinematically similar and well-studied H + Cl2 reaction shows good agreement, indicative of similar mechanisms. These kinetics and dynamics results seem to indicate that the potential energy surface is adequate to describe this reaction, and the reasonable agreement with experiment lends further confidence to this new surface.