Revisiting the reactivity between HCO and CH${}_3$ on interstellar grain surfaces

Abstract

Formation of interstellar complex organic molecules is currently thought to be dominated by the barrierless coupling between radicals on the interstellar icy grain surfaces. Previous standard DFT results on the reactivity between CH${}_3$ and HCO on amorphous water surfaces, showed that formation of CH${}_4$ + CO by H transfer from HCO to CH${}_3$ assisted by water molecules of the ice was the dominant channel. However, the adopted description of the electronic structure of the biradical (i.e., CH${}_3$/HCO) system was inadequate (without the broken-symmetry (BS) approach). In this work, we revisit the original results by means of BS-DFT both in gas phase and with one water molecule simulating the role of the ice. Results indicate that adoption of BS-DFT is mandatory to describe properly biradical systems. In the presence of the single water molecule, the water-assisted H transfer exhibits a high energy barrier. In contrast, CH${}_3$CHO formation is found to be barrierless. However, direct H transfer from HCO to CH${}_3$ to give CO and CH${}_4$ presents a very low energy barrier, hence being a potential competitive channel to the radical coupling and indicating, moreover, that the physical insights ofthe original work remain valid.

Submitted to MNRAS main journal. For associated supporting material refer to the publication in MNRAS. Accepted 2020 February 14. Received 2020 February 14

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• Synthesis of urea on the surface of interstellar water ice clusters. A quantum chemical study
• Theoretical computations on the efficiency of acetaldehyde formation on interstellar icy grains