No Arabic abstract
Interaction non-additivity in the chemical context means that binding of certain atom to a reference atom cannot be fully predicted from the interactions of these two atoms with other atoms. This constitutes one of key phenomena determining an identity of our world, which would have been much poorer otherwise. Ionic systems provide a good example of the interaction non-additivity in most cases due to electron transfer and delocalization effects. We report Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics (BOMD) simulations of LiCl, NaCl, and KCl at 300, 1500, and 2000 K. We show that our observations originate from interplay of thermal motion during BOMD and cation nature. In the case of alkali cations, ionic nature plays a more significant role than temperature. Our results bring fundamental understanding of electronic effects in the condensed phase of ionic systems and foster progress in physical chemistry and engineering.
Structural transformations in molecules and solids have generally been studied in isolation, while intermediate systems have eluded characterization. We show that a pair of CdS cluster isomers provides an advantageous experimental platform to study isomerization in well-defined atomically precise systems. The clusters coherently interconvert over an est. 1 eV energy barrier with a 140 meV shift in their excitonic energy gaps. There is a diffusionless, displacive reconfiguration of the inorganic core (solid-solid transformation) with first order (isomerization-like) transformation kinetics. Driven by a distortion of the ligand binding motifs, the presence of hydroxyl species changes the surface energy via physisorption, which determines phase stability in this system. This reaction possesses essential characteristics of both solid-solid transformations and molecular isomerizations, and bridges these disparate length scales.
Thermal effects contributing to the Casimir interaction between objects are usually small at room temperature and they are difficult to separate from quantum mechanical contributions at higher temperatures. We propose that the thermal Casimir force effect can be observed for a graphene flake suspended in a fluid between substrates at the room temperature regime. The properly chosen materials for the substrates and fluid induce a Casimir repulsion. The balance with the other forces, such as gravity and buoyancy, results in a stable temperature dependent equilibrium separation. The suspended graphene is a promising system due to its potential for observing thermal Casimir effects at room temperature.
The potential energy surface (PES) describing the interactions between $mathrm{Li_{2}(^{1}Sigma_{u}^{+})}$ and $mathrm{^{4}He}$ and an extensive study of the energies and structures of a set of small clusters, $mathrm{Li_{2}(He)_{n}}$, have been presented by us in a previous series of publications [1-3]. In the present work we want to extend the same analysis to the case of the excited $mathrm{Li_{2}}(a^{3}Sigma_{u}^{+})$ and of the ionized Li$_{2}^{+}(X^{2}Sigma_{g}^{+})$ moiety. We thus show here calculated interaction potentials for the two title systems and the corresponding fitting of the computed points. For both surfaces the MP4 method with cc-pV5Z basis sets has been used to generate an extensive range of radial/angular coordinates of the two dimensional PESs which describe rigid rotor molecular dopants interacting with one He partner.
We studied the effect of self-interaction error (SIE) on the static dipole polarizabilities of water clusters modelled with three increasingly sophisticated, non-empirical density functional approximations (DFAs), viz. the local spin density approximation (LDA), the Perdew-Burke-Ernzherof (PBE) generalized-gradient approximation (GGA), and the strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) meta-GGA, using the Perdew-Zunger self-interaction-correction (PZ-SIC) energy functional in the Fermi-Lowdin orbital SIC (FLO-SIC) framework. Our results show that while all three DFAs overestimate the cluster polarizabilities, the description systematically improves from LDA to PBE to SCAN. The self-correlation free SCAN predicts polarizabilities quite accurately with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.58 Bohr$^3$ with respect to coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) values. Removing SIE using PZ-SIC correctly reduces the DFA polarizabilities, but over-corrects, resulting in underestimated polarizabilities in SIC-LDA, -PBE, and -SCAN. Finally, we applied a recently proposed local-scaling SIC (LSIC) method using a quasi self-consistent scheme and using the kinetic energy density ratio as an iso-orbital indicator. The results show that the LSIC polarizabilities are in excellent agreement with mean absolute error of 0.08 Bohr$^3$ for LSIC-LDA and 0.06 Bohr$^3$ for LSIC-PBE with most recent CCSD polarizabilities. Likewise, the ionization energy estimates as an absolute of highest occupied energy eigenvalue predicted by LSIC are also in excellent agreement with CCSD(T) ionization energies with MAE of 0.4 eV for LSIC-LDA and 0.04 eV for LSIC-PBE. The LSIC-LDA predictions of ionization energies are comparable to the reported GW ionization energies while the LSIC-PBE ionization energies are more accurate than reported GW results.
Several calorimetric measurements have shown that 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium dicyanamide, [C2C1im][N(CN)2], is a glass-forming liquid, even though it is a low-viscous liquid at room temperature. Here we found slow crystallization during cooling of [C2C1im][N(CN)2] along Raman spectroscopy measurements. The low-frequency range of the Raman spectrum shows that the same crystalline phase is obtained at 210 K either by cooling or by reheating the glass (cold-crystallization). Another crystalline phase is formed at ca. 260 K just prior the melting at 270 K. X-ray diffraction and calorimetric measurements confirm that there are two crystalline phases of [C2C1im][N(CN)2]. The Raman spectra indicate that polymorphism is related to [C2C1im]+ with the ethyl chain on the plane of the imidazolium ring (the low-temperature crystal) or non-planar (the high-temperature crystal). The structural reason for the glass-forming ability of [C2C1im][N(CN)2], despite of the relatively simple molecular structures of the ions, was pursued by quantum chemistry calculations and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were performed for ionic pairs in order to draw free energy surfaces of the anion around the cation. The MD simulations using a polarizable model provided maps of occurrence of anions around cations. Both the quantum and classical calculations suggest that the delocalization of preferred positions of the anion around the cation, which adopts different conformations of the ethyl chain, is on the origin of the crystallization being hampered during cooling and the resulting glass-forming ability of [C2C1im][N(CN)2].