Representing Molecular Ground and Excited Vibrational Eigenstates with Nuclear Densities obtained from Semiclassical Initial Value Representation Molecular Dynamics
Chiara Aieta, Gianluca Bertaina, Marco Micciarelli, Michele Ceotto
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13 pages main text with 11 figures; 7 pages Supplementary material with 9 figures. Accepted by the Journal of Chemical Physics (See link below). Post-print version
We present in detail and validate an effective Monte Carlo approach for the calculation of the nuclear vibrational densities via integration of molecular eigenfunctions that we have preliminary employed to calculate the densities of the ground and the excited OH stretch vibrational states in protonated glycine molecule [C. Aieta et. al. Nat. Commun. 11, 4348 (2020)]. Here, we first validate and discuss in detail the features of the method on a benchmark water molecule. Then, we apply it to calculate on-the-fly the ab initio anharmonic nuclear densities in correspondence of the fundamental transitions of NH and CH stretches in protonated glycine. We show how we can gain both qualitative and quantitative physical insight by inspection of different one-nucleus densities and assign a character to spectroscopic absorption peaks using the expansion of vibrational states in terms of harmonic basis functions. The visualization of the nuclear vibrations in a purely quantum picture allows us to observe and quantify the effects of anharmonicity on the molecular structure, and to exploit the effect of IR excitations on specific bonds or functional groups, beyond the harmonic approximation. We also calculate the quantum probability distribution of bond-lengths, angles and dihedrals of the molecule. Notably, we observe how in the case of one type of fundamental NH stretching the typical harmonic nodal pattern is absent in the anharmonic distribution.
In this work we report a computational study of the vibrational features of four different nucleobases employing the divide-and-conquer semiclassical initial value representation molecular dynamics method. Calculations are performed on uracil, cytosine, thymine, and adenine. Results show that the overall accuracy with respect to experiments is within 20 wavenumbers, regardless of the dimensionality of the nucleobase. Vibrational estimates are accurate even in the complex case of cytosine, where two relevant conformers are taken into account. These results are promising in the perspective of fu…
The role of vibrational excitation of reactants in driving reactions involving polyatomic species has been often studied by means of classical or quasi-classical trajectory simulations. We propose a different approach based on investigation of vibrational features of the Cl$^-$--CH$_3$Cl pre-reaction complex for the Cl$^-$ + CH$_3$Cl SN$_2$ reaction. We present vibrational power spectra and frequency estimates for the title pre-reaction complex calculated at the level of classical, semiclassical, and second-order vibrational perturbation theory on a pre-existing analytical potential energy sur…
We describe a new approach based on semiclassical molecular dynamics that allows to simulate infrared absorption or emission spectra of molecular systems with inclusion of anharmonic intensities. This is achieved from semiclassical power spectra by computing first the vibrational eigenfunctions as a linear combination of harmonic states, and then the oscillator strengths associated to the vibrational transitions. We test the approach against a 1D Morse potential and apply it to the water molecule with results in excellent agreement with discrete variable representation quantum benchmarks. The …
We present and test an approximate method for the semiclassical calculation of vibrational spectra. The approach is based on the mixed time-averaging semiclassical initial value representation method, which is simplified to a form that contains a filter to remove contributions from approximately harmonic environmental degrees of freedom. This filter comes at no additional numerical cost, and it has no negative effect on the accuracy of peaks from the anharmonic system of interest. The method is successfully tested for a model Hamiltonian, and then applied to the study of the frequency shift of…
Molecular polaritons have become an emerging platform for remotely controlling molecular properties through strong light-matter interactions. Herein, a semiclassical approach is developed for describing molecular polaritons by self-consistently propagating the real-time dynamics of classical cavity modes and a quantum molecular subsystem described by the nuclear-electronic orbital (NEO) method, where electrons and specified nuclei are treated quantum mechanically on the same level. This semiclassical real-time NEO approach provides a unified description of electronic and vibrational strong cou…
We present how to compute vibrational eigenstates with tree tensor network states (TTNSs), the underlying ansatz behind the multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree (ML-MCTDH) method. The eigenstates are computed with an algorithm that is based on the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG). We apply this to compute the vibrational spectrum of acetonitrile (CH$_3$CN) to high accuracy and compare TTNSs with matrix product states (MPSs), the ansatz behind the DMRG. The presented optimization scheme converges much faster than ML-MCTDH-based optimization. For this particular system…
We report on a new approach to ease the computational overhead of ab initio on-the-fly semiclassical dynamics simulations for vibrational spectroscopy. The well known bottleneck of such computations lies in the necessity to estimate the Hessian matrix for propagating the semiclassical pre-exponential factor at each step along the dynamics. The procedure proposed here is based on the creation of a dynamical database of Hessians and associated molecular geometries able to speed up calculations while preserving the accuracy of results at a satisfactory level. This new approach can be interfaced t…
HF trimer: 12D fully coupled quantum calculations of HF-stretch excited intramolecular and intermolecular vibrational states using contracted bases of intramolecular and intermolecular eigenstates
A machine learning algorithm for partitioning the nuclear vibrational space into subspaces is introduced. The subdivision criterion is based on Liouville's theorem, i.e. best preservation of the unitary of the reduced dimensionality Jacobian determinant within each subspace along a probe full-dimensional classical trajectory. The algorithm is based on the idea of evolutionary selection and it is implemented through a probability graph representation of the vibrational space partitioning. We interface this customized version of genetic algorithms with our divide-and-conquer semiclassical initia…
A combined approach that uses the vibrational self-consistent field (VSCF) and vibrational configuration interaction (VCI) method together with the semiclassical instanton theory was developed to study vibrational tunneling spectra of molecules with multiple wells. The method can be applied to calculate low-lying vibrational states in the systems with arbitrary number of wells, which are not necessarily related by a symmetry operation. It is particularly suited to systems in which the wells are separated by large potential barriers and tunneling splittings are small, so that the exact quantum-…
A multidimensional semiclassical method for calculating tunneling splittings in vibrationally excited states of molecules using Cartesian coordinates is developed. It is an extension of the theory by Mil'nikov and Nakamura [$\textit{ J. Chem. Phys.}$ $\textbf{122}$, $124311$ $(2005)$] to asymmetric paths that are necessary for calculating tunneling splitting patterns in multi-well systems, such as water clusters. Additionally, new terms are introduced in the description of the semiclassical wavefunction that drastically improve the splitting estimates for certain systems. The method is based o…
A new semiclassical "divide-and-conquer" method is presented with the aim of demonstrating that quantum dynamics simulations of high dimensional molecular systems are doable. The method is first tested by calculating the quantum vibrational power spectra of water, methane, and benzene - three molecules of increasing dimensionality for which benchmark quantum results are available - and then applied to C60, a system characterized by 174 vibrational degrees of freedom. Results show that the approach can accurately account for quantum anharmonicities, purely quantum features like overtones, and t…
We present a novel approach to calculate molecular IR spectra based on semiclassical molecular dynamics. The main advance from a previous semiclassical method [M. Micciarelli, R. Conte, J. Suarez, M. Ceotto J. Chem. Phys. 149, 064115 (2018)] consists in the possibility to avoid state-to-state calculations making applications to systems characterized by sizable densities of vibrational states feasible. Furthermore, this new method accounts not only for positions and intensities of the several absorption bands which make up the IR spectrum, but also for their shapes. We show that accurate semicl…
A subset of the highly excited eigenstates of thiophosgene (SCCl$_{2}$) near the dissociation threshold are analyzed using sensitive measures of quantum ergodicity. We find several localized eigenstates, suggesting that the intramolecular vibrational energy flow dynamics is nonstatistical even at such high levels of excitations. The results are consistent with recent observations of sharp spectral features in the stimulated emission spectra of SCCl$_{2}$
We present an investigation of vibrational features in water clusters performed by means of our recently established divide-and-conquer semiclassical approach [M. Ceotto, G. Di Liberto, and R. Conte, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 010401 (2017)]. This technique allows us to simulate quantum vibrational spectra of high-dimensional systems starting from full-dimensional classical trajectories and projection of the semiclassical propagator onto a set of lower dimensional subspaces. The potential energy surface employed is a many-body representation up to three-body terms, in which monomers and two-body in…
A semiclassical non-adiabatic phase-space approach to molecular translations and rotations: A new picture of surface hopping and electronic inertial effects
We study the vibrational spectrum of the protonated water dimer, by means of a divide-and-conquer semiclassical initial value representation of the quantum propagator, as a first step in the study of larger protonated water clusters. We use the potential energy surface from [Huang et al., J. Chem. Phys. 122, 044308 (2005)]. To tackle such an anharmonic and floppy molecule, we employ fully Cartesian dynamics and carefully reduce the coupling to global rotations in the definition of normal modes. We apply the time-averaging filter and obtain clean power spectra relative to suitable reference sta…
We extensively describe our recently established "divide-and-conquer" semiclassical method [M. Ceotto, G. Di Liberto and R. Conte, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 010401 (2017)] and propose a new implementation of it to increase the accuracy of results. The technique permits to perform spectroscopic calculations of high dimensional systems by dividing the full-dimensional problem into a set of smaller dimensional ones. The partition procedure, originally based on a dynamical analysis of the Hessian matrix, is here more rigorously achieved through a hierarchical subspace-separation criterion based on Lio…
We introduce an improved semiclassical dynamics approach to quantum vibrational spectroscopy. In this method, a harmonic-based phase space sampling is preliminarily driven toward non-harmonic quantization by slowly switching on the actual potential. The new coordinates and momenta serve as initial conditions for the semiclassical dynamics calculation, leading to a substantial decrease in the number of chaotic trajectories to deal with. Applications are presented for model and molecular systems of increasing dimensionality characterized by moderate or high chaoticity. They include a bidimension…
We introduce vibrational heat-bath configuration interaction (VHCI) as an accurate and efficient method for calculating vibrational eigenstates of anharmonic systems. Inspired by its origin in electronic structure theory, VHCI is a selected CI approach that uses a simple criterion to identify important basis states with a pre-sorted list of anharmonic force constants. Screened second-order perturbation theory and simple extrapolation techniques provide significant improvements to variational energy estimates. We benchmark VHCI on four molecules with 12 to 48 degrees of freedom and use anharmon…
We present a methodology for computing vibrationally and time-resolved pump-probe spectra, which takes into account all vibrational degrees of freedom and is based on the combination of the thawed Gaussian approximation with on-the-fly ab initio evaluation of the electronic structure. The method is applied to the phenyl radical and compared with two more approximate approaches based on the global harmonic approximation - the global harmonic method expands both the ground- and excited-state potential energy surfaces to the second order about the corresponding minima, while the combined global h…
The increasing need to simulate the dynamics of photoexcited molecular and nanosystems in the sub-picosecond regime demands new efficient tools able to describe the quantum nature of matter at a low computational cost. By combining the power of the approximate DFTB method with the semiclassical Ehrenfest method for nuclear-electron dynamics we have achieved a real-time time-dependent DFTB (TD-DFTB) implementation that fits such requirements. In addition to enabling the study of nuclear motion effects in photoinduced charge transfer processes, our code adds novel features to the realm of static…
Determining the vibrational structure of a molecule is central to fundamental applications in several areas, from atmospheric science to catalysis, fuel combustion modeling, biochemical imaging, and astrochemistry. However, when significant anharmonicity and mode coupling are present, the problem is classically intractable for a molecule of just a few atoms. Here, we outline a set of quantum algorithms for solving the molecular vibrational structure problem for both near- and long-term quantum computers. There are previously unaddressed characteristics of this problem which require approaches …
The one-dimensional Schrödinger equation with symmetric trigonometric double-well potential is exactly solved via angular prolate spheroidal function. Although it is inferior compared with multidimensional counterparts and its limitations are obvious nevertheless its solution is shown to be analytic rather than commonly used numerical or approximate semiclassical (WKB) one. This comprises the novelty and the merit of the present work. Our exact analytic description of the ground state splitting can well be a referee point for comparison of the accuracy of numerous WKB formulas suggested in the…
We characterize excited state quantum phase transitions in the two dimensional limit of the vibron model with the quantum fidelity susceptibility, comparing the obtained results with the information provided by the participation ratio. As an application, we perform fits using a four-body algebraic Hamiltonian to bending vibrational data for several molecular species and, using the optimized eigenvalues and eigenstates, we locate the eigenstate closest to the barrier to linearity and determine the linear or bent character of the different overtones.
In this work we study the competition and correspondence between the classical and quantum routes to intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) in a three degrees of freedom model effective Hamiltonian. Specifically, we focus on the classical and the quantum dynamics near the resonance junctions on the Arnold web that are formed by intersection of independent resonances. The regime of interest models the IVR dynamics from highly excited initial states near dissociation thresholds of molecular systems wherein both classical and purely quantum, involving dynamical tunneling, routes t…
The atomistic resolution recently achieved by ultrafast spectroscopies demands corresponding theoretical advances. Real-time time-dependent density-functional theory (RT-TDDFT) with Ehrenfest dynamics offers an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational costs to study electronic and vibrational dynamics of laser-excited materials in the sub-picosecond regime. However, this approach is unable to account for thermal effects or zero-point energies which are crucial in the physics involved. Herein, we adopt a quantum-semiclassical method based on RT-TDDFT+Ehrenfest to simulate laser-indu…
