LiCN taking a dip in an Ar bath

We all know that it’s easier to move through air than water. Changing the environment to molasses means that you’ll move even slower. Thus it’s natural to think that the thicker (denser) the solvent (bath), the slower a particle will swim through it. More precisely, what matters is not the density but the degree to which the moving particle interacts with the solvent, and this can be described through the friction between the particle and the fluid. Chemical reactions have long known to be increasingly slower with increasing friction. The problem with this seemingly simple concept is that Kramers showed long ago that there exists a regime (when the surrounding fluid is very weakly interacting with the particle) in which the reactions actually speed up with increasing friction. This crazy regime arises because reactants need energy to surmount the barriers leading to products, and they are unable to get this energy from the solvent if their interaction is very weak. A small increase of this weak interaction facilitates the energy transfer, and voila the reaction rate increases. What Kramers didn’t find is a chemical reaction which actually exhibits this behavior, and the hunt for such a reaction has long been on…

A few years ago, my collaborators in Madrid and I found a reaction that seems to exhibit a rise and fall in chemical rates with increasing friction. (I wrote about one of my visits to my collaborators in Madrid in a previous post.) It involves the isomerization reaction from LiCN to CNLi where the lithium is initially bonded to the carbon, crosses a barrier and finally bonds to the nitrogen on the other side. We placed it inside an argon bath and used molecular dynamics to observe the rate. Our initial work fixed the CN bond length because that made the simulation much faster and we figured that the CN vibrational motion wouldn’t matter much. But the nagging concern that the CN motion might affect the results remained. So we went ahead and redid the calculations releasing the constraint on the CN motion. I’m happy to report that the rise and fall persisted. As such the LiCN isomerization reaction rate is fastest when the density of the Argon bath is neither too small nor too large, but rather when it is just right.

The article with my collaborators, Pablo Garcia Muller, Rosa Benito and Florentino Borondo was just published in the Journal of Chemical Physics 141, 074312 (2014), and may be found at this doi hyperlink. This work was funded by the NSF on the American side of the collaboration, by Ministry of Economy and Competiveness-Spain and ICMAT Severo Ochoa on the Spanish side, and by the EU’s Seventh Framework People Exchange programme.