Pseudopotential hole–particle formalism for excitations in xenon molecules and clusters. I. Theory, atomic and molecular tests

Conical Intersections in Solution with Polarizable Embedding: Integral-Exact Direct Reaction Field

A common strategy to exploring the properties and reactivity of complex systems is to use quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) embedding, wherein a QM region is defined and treated with electronic structure theory, and the remainder of the system is treated with a force field. Important to the description of electronic excited states, especially those of charge-transfer character, is the treatment of the coupling between the QM and MM subsystems. The state of the art is to use a polarizable force field for the MM region and mutually couple the QM wavefunction and MM induced dipoles, in addition to the usual electrostatic embedding, yielding a polarizable embedding (QM/MM-Pol) approach. However, we showed previously that current popular QM/MM-Pol approaches exhibit issues of root flipping and/or incorrect descriptions of electronic crossings in multistate calculations [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 14, 2137 (2018)]. Here, we demonstrate a solution to these problems with an integral-exact reformulation of the direct reaction field approach of Thole and Van Duijnen (QM/MM-IEDRF). The resulting embedding potential includes one- and two-electron operators and many-body dipole-induced dipole interactions and thus includes a natural description of the screening of electron-electron interactions by the MM induced dipoles. Pauli repulsion from the environment is mimicked by effective core potentials on the MM atoms. Inherent to the DRF approach is the assumption that MM dipoles respond instantaneously to the positions of the QM electrons; therefore, dispersion interactions are captured approximately. All electronic states are eigenfunctions of the same Hamiltonian, while the polarization induced in the environment and the associated energetic stabilization are unique to each state. This allows for a consistent definition of transition properties and state crossings. We demonstrate QM/MM-IEDRF by exploring the influence of a (polarizable) inert xenon matrix environment on the conical intersection underlying the photoisomerization of ethylene.

Interatomic potentials for ground and excited states of Ar+He

The potential energy curves (PECs) of the ground and excited states that correlate in the atomic limit with Ar([Ne]3s ²3p ⁶,¹S), Ar([Ne]3s ²3p ⁵4s ¹, ³P, ¹P), and Ar([Ne]3s ²3p ⁵4p ¹, ³D, ³P, ³S, ¹D, ¹P, ¹S) are calculated at the multireference configuration interaction (MRCI+Q) theoretical level with extrapolations to the complete basis set limit using all-electron correlation consistent triple-, quadruple-, and quintuple-zeta basis sets. Scalar relativistic corrections are calculated using second-order Douglas-Kroll-Hess Hamiltonian with the corresponding basis sets contracted for scalar relativistic Hamiltonians. For these calculations, the 3s orbitals of the Ar atom are not included in the active space but are correlated through single and double excitations. Spin-orbit eigenstates are computed by diagonalizing the Breit-Pauli matrix between internal configurations with no electrons in external orbitals and added to the scalar relativistic results. A total of 32 molecular PECs are computed with spin-orbit contributions, which correlate with 1s₁, 1s_5-2, and 2p_10-1 atomic Ar energies in Paschen notation. Important features of the PECs and system crossings are discussed.