An Efficient Strategy to Generate Atom Connecting Positions

Atom connecting positions(ACPs) are positions where an atom is connecting to another one or a few atoms, which is needed when constructing final state used in chain-of-state(CoS) methods for transition state(TS) locating and minimum energy path(MEP) searching, especially with bond formation. However, ACPs are generated with chemical insight and experience, which is not only low efficient and time wasting, but the manually generated structure may be far from the optimized one. A efficient method is presented here for generating ACPs which is based on spherical optimization and VSEPR theory without manual interfering. Several examples are testified to prove the efficiency and robustness of the method.