Reactivity prediction through quantum chemical calculations

The main challenge in chemistry is understanding and controlling the movement of atoms, which play a leading role in chemical reactions. In principle, one could predict the movement of atoms by solving the Schrödinger equation, however, which for many-particle systems is too complicated to solve with high accuracy. Thanks to advances in quantum chemical calculation methods, the Schrödinger equation for the motion of electrons is solvable with reasonable accuracy under various approximations.1 Among the approximation algorithms, the density functional theory (DFT) based on the Kohn-Sham equation is routinely used in calculations of the potential energy surface (PES) for a system of several hundred atoms.