Reaction pathways by quantum Monte Carlo: Insight on the torsion barrier of 1,3-butadiene, and the conrotatory ring opening of cyclobutene

Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are used to investigate the intramolecular reaction pathways of 1,3-butadiene. The ground state geometries of the three conformers s-trans, s-cis, and gauche, as well as the cyclobutene structure are fully optimised at the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) level, obtaining an excellent agreement with the experimental results and other quantum chemistry high level calculations. Transition state geometries are also estimated at the VMC level for the s-trans to gauche torsion barrier of 1,3-butadiene and for the conrotatory ring opening of cyclobutene to the gauche-1,3-butadiene conformer. The energies of the conformers and the reaction barriers are calculated at both variational and diffusional Monte Carlo levels providing a precise picture of the potential energy surface of 1,3-butadiene and supporting one of the two model profiles recently obtained by Raman spectroscopy [Boopalachandran et al., J. Phys. Chem. A 115, 8920 (2011)]. Considering the good scaling of QMC techniques with the system's size, our results also demonstrate how variational Monte Carlo calculations can be applied in the future to properly investigate the reaction pathways of large and correlated molecular systems.