An ab initio based full-dimensional potential energy surface for OH + O 2 ⮂ HO 3 and low-lying vibrational levels of HO 3
To offer an in-depth understanding of the HO 3 radical and its dissociation to OH + O 2 , a six-dimensional potential energy surface (PES) has been constructed by fitting 2087 energy points for the electronic ground state of HO 3 (X 2 A") using the permutation invariant polynomial-neural network (PIP-NN) approach. The energy points were calculated using an explicitly-correlated and Davidson-corrected multi-reference configuration interaction approach with the correlation-consistent polarized valence double zeta basis (MRCI( Q )-F12/VDZ-F12). On the PES, the trans -HO 3 isomer is found to be the global minimum, 33.0 cm -1 below the cis -HO 3 conformer, which is consistent with previous high-level theoretical investigations. The dissociation to the OH + O 2 asymptote from both conformers is shown to be barrierless. As a benchmark from a recently developed high-accuracy thermochemistry protocol, D 0 for trans -HO 3 is calculated to be 2.29 ± 0.36 kcal mol -1 , only slightly deeper than the value of 2.08 kcal mol -1 obtained using the PES, and in reasonable agreement with the experimentally estimated value of 2.93 ± 0.07 kcal mol -1 . Using this PES, low-lying vibrational energy levels of HO 3 are determined using an exact quantum Hamiltonian and compared with available experimental results.