Dynamic reaction coordinate in thermally fluctuating environment in the framework of the multidimensional generalized Langevin equations

Abstract

A framework recently developed for the extraction of a dynamic reaction coordinate to mediate reactions buried in a multidimensional Langevin equation is extended to the generalized Langevin equations without a priori assumption of the forms of the potential (in general, nonlinearly coupled systems) and the friction kernel. The equation of motion with memory effect can be transformed into an equation without memory at the cost of an increase in the dimensionality of the system, and hence the theoretical framework developed for the (nonlinear) Langevin formulation can be generalized to the non-Markovian process with colored noise. It is found that the increased dimension can be physically interpreted as effective modes of the fluctuating environment. As an illustrative example, we apply this theory to a multidimensional generalized Langevin equation for motion on the Müller-Brown potential surface with an exponential friction kernel. Numerical simulations find a boundary between the highly reactive region and the less reactive region in the space of initial conditions. The location of the boundary is found to depend significantly on both the memory kernel and the nonlinear couplings. The theory extracts a reaction coordinate whose sign determines the fate of the reaction taking into account thermally fluctuating environments, memory effect, and nonlinearities. It is found that the location of the boundary of reactivity is satisfactorily reproduced as the zero of the statistical average of the new reaction coordinate, which is an analytical functional of both the original position coordinates and velocities of the system, and of the properties of the environment.