No Arabic abstract
Modeling linear absorption spectra of solvated chromophores is highly challenging as contributions are present both from coupling of the electronic states to nuclear vibrations and solute-solvent interactions. In systems where excited states intersect in the Condon region, significant non-adiabatic contributions to absorption lineshapes can also be observed. Here, we introduce a robust approach to model linear absorption spectra accounting for both environmental and non-adiabatic effects from first principles. This model parameterizes a linear vibronic coupling (LVC) Hamiltonian directly from energy gap fluctuations calculated along molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories of the chromophore in solution, accounting for both anharmonicity in the potential and direct solute-solvent interactions. The resulting system dynamics described by the LVC Hamiltonian are solved exactly using the thermalized time-evolving density operator with orthogonal polynomials algorithm (T-TEDOPA). The approach is applied to the linear absorption spectrum of methylene blue (MB) in water. We show that the strong shoulder in the experimental spectrum is caused by vibrationally driven population transfer between the bright S1 and the dark S2 state. The treatment of the solvent environment is one of many factors which strongly influences the population transfer and lineshape; accurate modeling can only be achieved through the use of explicit quantum mechanical solvation. The efficiency of T-TEDOPA, combined with LVC Hamiltonian parameterizations from MD, leads to an attractive method for describing a large variety of systems in complex environments from first principles.
Including quantum mechanical effects on the dynamics of nuclei in the condensed phase is challenging, because the complexity of exact methods grows exponentially with the number of quantum degrees of freedom. Efforts to circumvent these limitations can be traced down to two approaches: methods that treat a small subset of the degrees of freedom with rigorous quantum mechanics, considering the rest of the system as a static or classical environment, and methods that treat the whole system quantum mechanically, but using approximate dynamics. Here we perform a systematic comparison between these two philosophies for the description of quantum effects in vibrational spectroscopy, taking the Embedded Local Monomer (LMon) model and a mixed quantum-classical (MQC) model as representatives of the first family of methods, and centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) and thermostatted ring polymer molecular dynamics (TRPMD) as examples of the latter. We use as benchmarks D$_2$O doped with HOD and pure H$_2$O at three distinct thermodynamic state points (ice Ih at 150K, and the liquid at 300K and 600K), modeled with the simple q-TIP4P/F potential energy and dipole moment surfaces. With few exceptions the different techniques yield IR absorption frequencies that are consistent with one another within a few tens of cm$^{-1}$. Comparison with classical molecular dynamics demonstrates the importance of nuclear quantum effects up to the highest temperature, and a detailed discussion of the discrepancies between the various methods let us draw some (circumstantial) conclusions about the impact of the very different approximations that underlie them. Such cross validation between radically different approaches could indicate a way forward to further improve the state of the art in simulations of condensed-phase quantum dynamics.
Exciton formation leads to J-bands in solid pentacene. Describing these exciton bands represents a challenge for both time-dependent (TD) density-functional theory (DFT) and for its semiempirical analogue, namely for TD density-functional tight binding (DFTB) for three reasons (i) solid pentacene and pentacene aggregates are bound only by van der Waals forces which are notoriously difficult to describe with DFT and DFTB, (ii) the proper description of the long-range coupling between molecules, needed to describe Davydov splitting, is not easy to include in TD-DFT with traditional functionals and in TD-DFTB, and (iii) mixing may occur between local and charge transfer excitons, which may, in turn, require special functionals. We assess how far TD-DFT and TD-DFTB have progressed towards a correct description of this type of exciton by including both a dispersion correction for the ground state and a range-separated hybrid functional for the excited state. Analytic results for parallel-stacked ethylene are derived which go beyond Kashas exciton model in that we are able to make a clear distinction between charge transfer and energy transfer excitons. This is further confirmed when it is shown that range-separated hybrids have a markedly greater effect on charge-transfer excitons than on energy-transfer excitons in the case of parallel-stacked pentacenes. TD-DFT calculations with the CAM-B3LYP functional and TD-lc-DFT calculations lead to negligeable excitonic corrections for the herringbone crystal structure, possibly because of an overcorrection of charge-transfer effects. In this case, TD-DFT calculations with the B3LYP functional or TD-DFTB calculations parameterized to B3LYP give the best results for excitonic corrections for the herringbone crystal structure as judged from comparison with experimental spectra and with Bethe-Salpeter equation calculations from the literature.
We present a new non-adiabatic ring polymer molecular dynamics (NRPMD) method based on the spin mapping formalism, which we refer to as the spin-mapping NRPMD (SM-NRPMD) approach. We derive the path-integral partition function expression using the spin coherent state basis for the electronic states and the ring polymer formalism for the nuclear degrees of freedom (DOFs). This partition function provides an efficient sampling of the quantum statistics. Using the basic property of the Stratonovich-Weyl transformation, we derive a Hamiltonian which we propose for the dynamical propagation of the coupled spin mapping variables and the nuclear ring polymer. The accuracy of the SM-NRPMD method is numerically demonstrated by computing nuclear position and population auto-correlation functions of non-adiabatic model systems. The results from SM-NRPMD agree very well with the numerically exact results. The main advantage of using the spin mapping variables over the harmonic oscillator mapping variables is numerically demonstrated, where the former provides nearly time-independent expectation values of physical observables for systems under thermal equilibrium, the latter can not preserve the initial quantum Boltzmann distribution. We also explicitly demonstrate that SM-NRPMD provides invariant dynamics upon various ways of partitioning the state-dependent and state-independent potentials.
We introduce a local machine-learning method for predicting the electron densities of periodic systems. The framework is based on a numerical, atom-centred auxiliary basis, which enables an accurate expansion of the all-electron density in a form suitable for learning isolated and periodic systems alike. We show that using this formulation the electron densities of metals, semiconductors and molecular crystals can all be accurately predicted using a symmetry-adapted Gaussian process regression model, properly adjusted for the non-orthogonal nature of the basis. These predicted densities enable the efficient calculation of electronic properties which present errors on the order of tens of meV/atom when compared to ab initio density-functional calculations. We demonstrate the key power of this approach by using a model trained on ice unit cells containing only 4 water molecules to predict the electron densities of cells containing up to 512 molecules, and see no increase in the magnitude of the errors of derived electronic properties when increasing the system size. Indeed, we find that these extrapolated derived energies are more accurate than those predicted using a direct machine-learning model.
We show that in non-collinear magnetic molecules, non-adiabatic (dynamical) effects due to the electron-vibron coupling are time-reversal symmetry breaking interactions for the vibrational field. As in these systems the electronic wavefunction can not be chosen as real, a nonzero geometric vector potential (Berry connection) arises. As a result, an intrinsic nonzero vibrational angular momentum occurs even for non-degenerate modes and in the absence of external probes. The vibronic modes can then be seen as elementary quantum particles carrying a sizeable angular momentum. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the magnitude of this topological effect by performing non-adiabatic first principles calculations on platinum clusters and by showing that these molecules host sizeable intrinsic phonon angular momenta comparable to the orbital electronic ones in itinerant ferromagnets.