Nonadiabatic Forward-Flux Sampling of Rare Molecular Gas-Phase Ammonia Photodissociation

Abstract

Simulating rare events in photochemistry by brute-force surface hopping is computationally prohibitive: most propagated trajectories either remain nonreactive or follow dominant relaxation channels, while the reaction of interest may occur with very low probability. Path sampling methods have long addressed this problem for ground-state dynamics, but their extension to nonadiabatic processes has so far been limited to low-dimensional analytical models. Here, we demonstrate that our recently developed nonadiabatic forward-flux sampling (NAFFS) method can be applied to efficiently simulate rare-events in full-dimensional molecular systems. As a representative benchmark, we investigate the rare molecular photodissociation channel of gas-phase ammonia, NH$_3$ + h$\nu \rightarrow$ NH + H$_2$. NAFFS samples reactive trajectories with the correct statistical weight, reproduces the reaction rate constant obtained in previous brute-force dynamical studies, provides direct access to mechanistic information through an averaged committor analysis, and reduces the simulation time per transition trajectory by up to three orders of magnitude. These results establish NAFFS as an efficient and statistically rigorous framework for investigating rare nonadiabatic processes in realistic molecular systems.