Comment on "Exploring Potential Energy Surface with External Forces"

Recently a work (K.Wolinski, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2018, 14, 6306, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.8b00885) was published in which the SEGO method (Standard and Enforced Geometry Optimization) was proposed to find new minimums on potential energy surfaces. We study this important method from a theoretical point of view. Up to date, the understanding of the proposer does not take into account the barrier breakdown point on a SEGO path being usually half of the path which is searched for. However, a better understanding of the method allows us to follow along the reaction pathway from a minimum to a saddle point, or vice versa. We discuss the well-known two-dimensional MB-test surface where we calculate full SEGO pathways. If one has special SEGO curves at hand, one can also detect some weaknesses of the ansatz.