Analytical first derivatives of the energy for small CI expansions

Photochemistry in the strong coupling regime: A trajectory surface hopping scheme

The strong coupling regime between confined light and organic molecules turned out to be promising in modifying both the ground state and the excited states properties. Under this peculiar condition, the electronic states of the molecule are mixed with the quantum states of light. The dynamical processes occurring on such hybrid states undergo several modifications accordingly. Hence, the dynamical description of chemical reactivity in polaritonic systems needs to explicitly take into account the photon degrees of freedom and nonadiabatic events. With the aim of describing photochemical polaritonic processes, in the present work, we extend the direct trajectory surface hopping scheme to investigate photochemistry under strong coupling between light and matter.

Semiempirical Quantum-Chemical Orthogonalization-Corrected Methods: Theory, Implementation, and Parameters

Semiempirical orthogonalization-corrected methods (OM1, OM2, and OM3) go beyond the standard MNDO model by explicitly including additional interactions into the Fock matrix in an approximate manner (Pauli repulsion, penetration effects, and core–valence interactions), which yields systematic improvements both for ground-state and excited-state properties. In this Article, we describe the underlying theoretical formalism of the OMx methods and their implementation in full detail, and we report all relevant OMx parameters for hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine. For a standard set of mostly organic molecules commonly used in semiempirical method development, the OMx results are found to be superior to those from standard MNDO-type methods. Parametrized Grimme-type dispersion corrections can be added to OM2 and OM3 energies to provide a realistic treatment of noncovalent interaction energies, as demonstrated for the complexes in the S22 and S66×8 test sets.

Photoconversion of the fluorescent protein EosFP: a hybrid potential simulation study reveals intersystem crossings

Fluorescent proteins undergoing green to red photoconversion have proved to be essential tools in cell biology, notably in superlocalization nanoscopy. However, the exact mechanism governing photoconversion, which overall involves irreversible cleavage of the protein backbone and elongation of the chromophore pi-conjugation, remains unclear. In this paper we present a theoretical investigation of the photoconversion reaction in the fluorescent protein EosFP, using excited-state hybrid quantum chemical and molecular mechanical potentials, in conjunction with reaction-path-finding techniques. Our results reveal a mechanism in which the hydroxybenzylidene moiety of the chromophore remains protonated and there is an excited state proton transfer from His62 to Phe61 that promotes peptide bond cleavage. Excitation of the neutral green form of EosFP to the first singlet excited state is followed by two intersystem crossing events, first to a triplet state and then back to the ground state singlet surface. From there, a number of rearrangements occur in the ground state and lead to the red form. Analyses of the structures and energies of the intermediates along the reaction path enable us to identify the critical role of the chromophore environment in promoting photoinduced backbone cleavage. Possible ways in which photoconvertible fluorescent proteins can be engineered to facilitate photoconversion are considered.

Self-consistent polarization neglect of diatomic differential overlap: application to water clusters

Semiempirical self-consistent field (SCF) methods based on the neglect of diatomic differential overlap (NDDO) formalism have the ability to treat the formation and breaking of chemical bonds but have been found to poorly describe hydrogen bonding and weak electrostatic complexes. In contrast, most empirical potentials are not able to describe bond breaking and formation but have the ability to add missing elements of hydrogen bonding by using classical electrostatic interactions. We present a new method which combines aspects of both NDDO-based SCF techniques and classical descriptions of polarization to describe the diffuse nature of the electronic wavefunction in a self-consistent manner. We develop the "self-consistent polarization neglect of diatomic differential overlap" (SCP-NDDO) theory with the additional description of molecular dispersion developed as a second-order perturbation theory expression. The current study seeks to model water-water interactions as a test case. To this end, we have parametrized the method to accurate ab initio complete basis set limit estimates of small water cluster binding energies of Xantheas and co-workers [J. Chem. Phys. 116, 1493 (2002); 120, 823 (2004)]. Overall agreement with the ab initio binding energies (n=2-6, and 8) is achieved with a rms error of 0.19 kcal/mol. We achieve noticeable improvements in the structure, vibrational frequencies, and energetic predictions of water clusters (n< or =21) relative to standard NDDO-based methods.

Are azobenzenophanes rotation-restricted?

We simulated the photoisomerization dynamics of an azobenzenophane with a semiclassical surface hopping approach and a semiempirical reparametrized quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics Hamiltonian. Only one of the two azobenzene chromophores in the molecule is taken into account quantum mechanically: the other one is treated by molecular mechanics. Both n-->pi* and pi-->pi* excitations are considered. Our results show that the photoisomerization reaction mainly involves the rotation around the N=N double bond. The excited state relaxation features are in qualitative agreement with experimental time-resolved fluorescence results.