Mixing of electronic states in molybdenum complexes involved in nitrogen activation

The mechanism for nitrogen activation by molybdenum complexes is a complicated one, involving as it does the coupling of a quartet molybdenum reactant with a singlet nitrogen molecule, passing via a series of quartet and doublet encounter complexes to a triplet intermediate, with the subsequent spin crossing to the singlet surface which then leads via a singlet transition state to the final pair of singlet products. We have investigated in detail a variety of levels of theory to describe the crossing of these electronic surfaces and have calculated both lower-bound and actual minimum energy crossing points for the key spin inversion processes.