Structure elucidation and construction of isomerisation pathways in small to moderate-sized (6–27) MgO nanoclusters: an adaptive mutation simulated annealing based analysis with quantum chemical calculations

Abstract

Determination of global minimum structures and elucidation of reaction paths or minimum energy paths between low-lying minima are of great chemical importance. To that end, we have used our own Adaptive Mutation Simulated Annealing method to determine the global minimum and the minimum energy paths for various isomerisation reactions for small to moderate-sized (MgO)_n (n = 6–27) clusters, using the Born–Mayer potential with suitable parameter values. The minimum energy structures obtained by us match well with previously reported data and are used as guess structures for further optimisation at the DFT level (using the B3LYP functional and DGDZVP basis set). Our optimised structures are found to match very well with the further DFT optimised structures, where the comparison is done by determining the root mean square deviation values as well as the radial distribution function profiles. A scheme is proposed to determine the minimum energy paths for isomerisation reactions for some cluster sizes where the transition state/s obtained by us, at very low computational cost, match well with those obtained from further optimisation using DFT calculations. We have shown the efficacy of our method in determining the reaction pathways, even for cases that involve multi-step reactions.