Pierre has published a new method for canonical instantons!

Divide-and-Conquer Method for Instanton Rate Theory

by Pierre Winter

Ring-polymer instanton theory has been developed to simulate the quantum dynamics of molecular systems at low temperatures. Chemical reaction rates can be obtained by locating the dominant tunneling pathway and analyzing fluctuations around it. In the standard method, calculating the fluctuation terms involves the diagonalization of a large matrix, which can be unfeasible for large systems with a high number of ring- polymer beads. Here we present a method for computing the instanton fluctuations with a large reduction in computational scaling. This method is applied to three reactions described by fitted, analytic and on-the-fly ab initio potential-energy surfaces and is shown to be numerically stable for the calculation of thermal reaction rates even at very low temperature.

arXiv: external pagehttp://arxiv.org/abs/1903.09504

DOI: external page10.1021/acs.jctc.8b01267

Our new method divides the initial instanton trajectory into piece with small action
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