State-to-state reactive differential cross sections for the H+H2-->H2+H reaction on five different potential energy surfaces employing a new quantum wavepacket computer code: DIFFREALWAVE.

State-to-state differential cross sections have been calculated for the hydrogen exchange reaction, H+H2-->H2+H, using five different high quality potential energy surfaces with the objective of examining the sensitivity of these detailed cross sections to the underlying potential energy surfaces. The calculations were performed using a new parallel computer code, DIFFREALWAVE. The code is based on the real wavepacket approach of Gray and Balint-Kurti [J. Chem. Phys. 108, 950 (1998)]. The calculations are parallelized over the helicity quantum number Omega' (i.e., the quantum number for the body-fixed z component of the total angular momentum) and wavepackets for each J,Omega' set are assigned to different processors, similar in spirit to the Coriolis-coupled processors approach of Goldfield and Gray [Comput. Phys. Commun. 84, 1 (1996)]. Calculations for J=0-24 have been performed to obtain converged state-to-state differential cross sections in the energy range from 0.4 to 1.2 eV. The calculations employ five different potential energy surfaces, the BKMP2 surface and a hierarchical family of four new ab initio surfaces [S. L. Mielke, et al., J. Chem. Phys. 116, 4142 (2002)]. This family of four surfaces has been calculated using three different hierarchical sets of basis functions and also an extrapolation to the complete basis set limit, the so called CCI surface. The CCI surface is the most accurate surface for the H3 system reported to date. Our calculations of differential cross sections are the first to be reported for the A2, A3, A4, and CCI surfaces. They show that there are some small differences in the cross sections obtained from the five different surfaces, particularly at higher energies. The calculations also show that the BKMP2 performs well and gives cross sections in very good agreement with the results from the CCI surface, displaying only small divergences at higher energies.