Seeking Saddle Points with Sella

Identification and refinement of first order saddle point (FOSP) structures on the potential energy surface (PES) of chemical systems is a computational bottleneck in the characterization of reaction pathways. Leading FOSP refinement strategies for modestly sized molecular systems require calculation of the full Hessian matrix, which is not feasible for larger systems such as those encountered in heterogeneous catalysis. For these systems, the standard approach to FOSP refinement involves iterative diagonalization of the Hessian, but this comes at the cost of longer refinement trajectories due to the lack of accurate curvature information. I will be presenting a method we have developed for incorporating information obtained by an iterative diagonalization algorithm into the construction of an approximate Hessian matrix that accelerates FOSP refinement. We measure the performance of our method with two established FOSP refinement benchmarks and find a 50% reduction on average in the number of gradient evaluations required to converge to a FOSP for one benchmark, and a 25% reduction on average for the second benchmark. [1]

References:

1. E. D. Hermes et al., J. Chem. Theory Compute. In press. doi:10.1021/acs.jctc.9b00869