Intrinsic-reaction-coordinate calculations

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Revision as of 10:27, 7 December 2022 by Tbucko (talk | contribs) (introduced the page for the IRC calculation)

The potential energy profiles along intrinsic reaction coordinate (IRC) can be computed via damped velocity Verlet algorithm of Hratchian and Schlegel[1].


Experienced users can affect the performance of the dimer method by modifying the numerical values of the following parameters (the given example values are the default values):

  • IRC_DIRECTION direction of the initial displacement (-1|1 – negative|positive)
  • IRC_STOP = 20 the number of steps the energy must monotonously increase, used as a termination criterion for the DVV procedure (going from TS you expect to decrease energy till you reach a minimum (that’s the time to stop) and then energy increases again). In order to avoid a premature simulation termination (especially close to TS, i.e. at the very beginning of simulation), e.g., due to a numerical noise, DVVEHISTORY should always be greater than 1 (10-50 usually does the job)
  • IRC_MINSTEP = 0.0250
  • IRC_MAXSTEP = 3.0000
  • IRC_VNORM0 = 0.0020
  • IRC_DELTA0 = 0.0015