Excited-state distortions control the reactivities and regioselectivities of photochemical 4π-electrocyclizations of fluorobenzenes

The photochemistry of benzene is complex and non-selective because numerous mechanistic pathways are accessible in the ground- and excited-states. Fluorination is a known strategy to increase the chemoselectivities for Dewar-benzenes via 4π-disrotatory electrocyclization. However, the origin of the chemo- and regioselectivities of fluorobenzenes remains unexplained because of experimental limitations in resolving the excited-state structures on ultrafast timescales. The computational cost of multiconfigurational nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations is also generally prohibitive. We now provide high-fidelity structural information and reaction outcome predictions with machine-learning-accelerated photodynamics simulations of a series of fluorobenzenes, C6F6-nHn, n=0–3 to study their S1→S0 decay in 4 ns. We trained neural networks with XMS-CASPT2(6,7)/aug-cc-pVDZ calculations, which reproduced the S1 absorption features with mean absolute errors of 0.04 eV (< 2 nm). The predicted S1 excited-state lifetimes for C6F4H2, C6F6, C6F5H, and C6F3H3 are 64, 40, 18, and 8 ps, respectively. The trend is in excellent agreement with the experimental lifetimes. Our calculations show that the pseudo Jahn-Teller distortions create the S1 minimum region that prolongs the excited-state lifetime of fluorobenzenes. The pseudo Jahn-Teller distortions reduce when fluorination decreases. Characterization of the surface hopping structures suggests that the S1 relaxation first involves a cis-trans isomerization of a 𝜋C-C-bond in the benzene ring, promoted by the pseudo-Jahn-Teller distortions. A branching plane analysis revealed that the conical intersections favoring 4π-electrocyclization are less energetically accessible through the S1 relaxation; lower-energy conical intersections resemble the reactant and favor reversion.

Nonadiabatic Molecular Dynamics by Multiconfiguration Pair-Density Functional Theory

We present the first implementation of multiconfiguration pair-density functional theory (MC-PDFT) ab initio molecular dynamics. MC-PDFT is a multireference electronic structure method that in many cases has a similar accuracy (or even better accuracy) than complete active space second order perturbation theory (CASPT2) at a significantly lower computational cost. In this work we introduced MC-PDFT analytical gradients into the SHARC molecular dynamics program for ab initio, nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations. We verify our implementation by examining the intersystem crossing dynamics of thioformaldehyde, and we observe excellent agreement with recent CASPT2 and experimental findings. Moreover, with MC-PDFT we could perform dynamics with an active space that was computationally too expensive for CASPT2.