The latest PCCP 10th Anniversary Article is a paper by David Nesbitt and Feng Dong. David Nesbitt is a professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a member of the PCCP Editorial Board.

Nesbitt's paper tackles the tunnelling dynamics in the vinyl radical, using a combination of high level ab initio calculations extrapolated to the 'complete basis set limit' and explicit treatment of tunnelling with large amplitude motion Hamiltonian methods.

Nesbitt explained that the vinyl radical plays a very important role in combustion modelling. 'This is true both by virtue of it serving as a prototype of large amplitude conformational change as well as a key intermediate in the formation or growth of large aromatic rings leading to soot,' he said.

Despite vinyl's molecular 'simplicity', Nesbitt says it continues to hold many surprises for us. 'From a spectroscopic viewpoint, for example, there is still a largely incomplete vibrational data set in the gas phase, with unresolved controversies over frequencies measured via matrix vs high resolution vs time resolved FTIR methods.'

Nesbitt hopes that a detailed understanding of such 'simple' systems will provide important benchmarks for comparison between theory and experiment, as well as unexpected insights into the conformational gymnastics in open shell species.