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The reaction of methanol on Pt−Au bimetallic clusters on TiO 2 (110) with varying bulk Au fractions has been studied by temperature programmed desorption (TPD) experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The bimetallic clusters with bulk Au fractions greater than 50% have surfaces that are 100% Au, but these Pt−Au clusters exhibit activity for methanol decomposition that is characteristic of Pt rather than Au; while methanol reaction on pure Pt clusters forms CO as a major product, reaction on pure Au clusters produces formaldehyde. Furthermore, as the bulk Pt concentration is decreased from 100 to 50% in the Pt−Au clusters, the CO yield decreases by only ∼25%. This behavior is consistent with methoxy-induced diffusion of Pt to the surface of the clusters in order to form strong Pt− methoxy bonds. DFT studies indicate that it is thermodynamically favorable for Pt to diffuse to the surface and bind to the methoxy adsorbate. Specifically, DFT calculations show that the methoxy intermediate bound to a single Pt atom in a Au monolayer on Pt( 111) is more thermodynamically stable than methoxy bound to a Au monolayer modified by underlying Pt(111). Although extensive changes in activity due to bimetallic interactions are not observed, the peak temperature for CO desorption decreases by 25 K as the Pt fraction is decreased from 100% to 25%, and the selectivity for methane is higher on bimetallic clusters than on either of the pure metals.

A new scanning method with complementary graph to describe the ring potential energy surface of furanoses is introduced. Density functional theory at the B3LYP level of theory with the 6-311G(d,p) basis set is used to calculate the energy of the partially minimized structures. The method is used to determine the correlation between the preferred conformation of oxocarbenium ions that are model intermediates for a glycosylation reaction and recent experimental results. Key disagreements between the predicted geometry and the minima based on the scans described herein indicate that the preferred oxocarbenium ion conformation is not a consistent predictor of preferred stereochemistry of the products.

Strong orthogonality is an important constraint placed on geminal wavefunctions in order to make variational minimization tractable. However, strong orthogonality prevents certain, possibly important, excited configurations from contributing to the ground state description of chemical systems. The presented method lifts strong orthogonality constraint from geminal wavefunction by computing a perturbative-like correction to each geminal independently from the corrections to all other geminals. The method is applied to the Singlet-type Strongly orthogonal Geminals variant of the geminal wavefunction. Comparisons of this new SS(p)G method are made to the non-orthogonal AP1roG and the unconstrained Geminal Mean-Field Configuration Interaction method using small atomic and molecular systems. The correction is also compared to Density Matrix Renormalization Group calculations performed on long polyene chains in order to assess its scalability and applicability to large strongly correlated systems. The results of these comparisons demonstrate that although the perturbative correction is small, it may be a necessary first step in the systematic improvement of any strongly orthogonal geminal method.

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