Rate Coeffcients and Branching Ratio for Multi-Channel Hydrogen Abstractions from CH₃OH by F

The hydrogen abstraction reaction F+CH₃OH has two possible reaction pathways: HF+CH₃O and HF+CH₂OH. Despite the absence of intrinsic barriers for both channels, the former has a branching ratio comparable to the latter, which is far from the statistical limit of 0.25 (one out of four available H atoms). Furthermore, the measured branching ratio of the two abstraction channels spans a large range and is not quantitatively reproduced by previous theoretical predictions based on the transition-state theory with the stationary point information calculated at the levels of M?ller-Plesset perturbation theory and G2. This work reports a theoretical investigation on the kinetics and the associated branching ratio of the two competing channels of the title reaction using a quasi-classical trajectory approach on an accurate full-dimensional potential energy surface (PES) fitted by the permutation invariant polynomial-neural network approach to ca. 1.21x10⁵ points calculated at the explicitly correlated (F12a) version of coupled cluster singles doubles and perturbative triples (CCSD(T)) level with the aug-cc-pVDZ basis set. The calculated room temperature rate coeffcient and branching ratio of the HF+CH₃O channel are in good agreement with the available experimental data. Furthermore, our theory predicts that rate coeffcients have a slightly negative temperature dependence, consistent with barrierless nature of the reaction.