Proton transfer from water to ketyl radical anion: Assessment of critical size of hydrated cluster and free energy barrier in solution from first principles simulations

- The aqueous reactivity of an organic intermediate, ketyl radical anion was investigated.
- The critical size of reactive hydrated cluster contains three water molecules.
- The cooperativity of water molecules plays a major role for reactivity.
- Proton transfer from water to ketyl radical anion was explored with biased FPMD simulation.

We present the reactivity of an organic intermediate by studying the proton transfer process from water to ketyl radical anion using gas phase electronic structure calculations and the metadynamics method based first principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) simulations. Our results indicate that during the micro solvation of anion by water molecules systematically, the presence of minimum three water molecules in the gas phase cluster is sufficient to observe the proton transfer event. The analysis of trajectories obtained from initial FPMD simulation of an aqueous solution of the anion does not show any evident of complete transfer of the proton from water. The cooperativity of water molecules and the relatively weak anion-water interaction in liquid state prohibit the full release of the proton. Using biasing potential through first principles metadynamics simulations, we report the observation of proton transfer reaction from water to ketyl radical anion with a barrier height of 16.0 kJ/mol.

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