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  1. null (Ed.)
    Photochemical reactions are widely used by academic and industrial researchers to construct complex molecular architectures via mechanisms that often require harsh reaction conditions. Photodynamics simulations provide time-resolved snapshots of molecular excited-state structures required to understand and predict reactivities and chemoselectivities. Molecular excited-states are often nearly degenerate and require computationally intensive multiconfigurational quantum mechanical methods, especially at conical intersections. Non-adiabatic molecular dynamics require thousands of these computations per trajectory, which limits simulations to ∼1 picosecond for most organic photochemical reactions. Westermayr et al. recently introduced a neural-network-based method to accelerate the predictions of electronic properties and pushed the simulation limit to 1 ns for the model system, methylenimmonium cation (CH 2 NH 2 + ). We have adapted this methodology to develop the Python-based, Python Rapid Artificial Intelligence Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics (PyRAI 2 MD) software for the cis – trans isomerization of trans -hexafluoro-2-butene and the 4π-electrocyclic ring-closing of a norbornyl hexacyclodiene. We performed a 10 ns simulation for trans -hexafluoro-2-butene in just 2 days. The same simulation would take approximately 58 years with traditional multiconfigurational photodynamics simulations. We generated training data by combining Wigner sampling, geometrical interpolations, and short-time quantum chemical trajectories to adaptively sample sparse data regions along reaction coordinates. The final data set of the cis – trans isomerization and the 4π-electrocyclic ring-closing model has 6207 and 6267 data points, respectively. The training errors in energy using feedforward neural networks achieved chemical accuracy (0.023–0.032 eV). The neural network photodynamics simulations of trans -hexafluoro-2-butene agree with the quantum chemical calculations showing the formation of the cis -product and reactive carbene intermediate. The neural network trajectories of the norbornyl cyclohexadiene corroborate the low-yielding syn -product, which was absent in the quantum chemical trajectories, and revealed subsequent thermal reactions in 1 ns. 
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  2. null (Ed.)