Two Preprints: Wavefunction analysis

Felix

Two new preprints dealing with the analysis of excited-state electronic wavefunctions are available from ChemRxiv.

First, a quick summary of the TheoDORE package: TheoDORE: a Toolbox for a Detailed and Automated Analysis of Electronic Excited State Computations.

Second, a more extensive paper exploring how far we can use information from excited-state wavefunction analysis tools to understand excitation energies beyond the molecular orbital picture. The energy of a correlated electron-hole pair is derived using diagrammatic techniques and this information is further used for a graphical depiction in terms of different charge distributions and their electrostatic potentials. Doing so turned out not as easy as hoped for but was very exciting. Find more here: Toward an Understanding of Electronic Excitation Energies Beyond the Molecular Orbital Picture by P. Kimber and F. Plasser.

Toward an Understanding of Electronic Excitation Energies Beyond the Molecular Orbital Picture

Talk: Beyond the MO picture

Felix

Tomorrow, Felix will give a talk at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, Groningen. The talk is entitled: Understanding electronic excitation energies within and beyond the molecular orbital picture. It discusses how we can understand excited-state energies beyond simply looking at orbitals and their energies.

You can download the talk here:

Download

Paper: OpenMolcas – a powerful electronic structure code going open-source

Felix

You can find the new paper describing the OpenMolcas package in JCTC – OpenMolcas: From source code to insight. OpenMolcas represents the open-source release of the previously commercially distributed Molcas package. Use OpenMolcas to gain access to powerful multireference methods for free and to have full control if you need to modify the source.

My own contributions to Molcas are concerned with the implementation of the wavefunction analysis module &WFA , as described in JCTC 13, 5343 (2017), and the interface to Columbus. Let me know if you have any questions about these.

New functionality for OpenMolcas

Felix

An update of the WFA module has been posted to OpenMolcas. This update integrates the fragment-based analysis that was previously only available via the TheoDORE code. In particular, it allows the automatic analysis of excited-state character in transition metal complexes [1, 2] with just a few added lines in the input file to OpenMolcas. This functionality is described here.

Thank you to Feng Chen from Loughborough University’s Research Software Engineering program for implementing the new code.

Paper: Details in the surface hopping method

Felix

Our paper “Strong Influence of Decoherence Corrections and Momentum Rescaling in Surface Hopping Dynamics of Transition Metal Complexes” was just accepted in JCTC. In this work we investigated the reliability of the surface hopping method in the case of a transition metal complex described using a linear vibronic coupling model. We found that various seemingly unimportant parameters can have a strong influence on the results.

Continue reading →

Paper: Two-photon absorption

Felix

Our new paper Effect of Symmetric and Asymmetric Substitution on the Optoelectronic Properties of 9,10-Dicyanoanthracene, written in collaboration with colleagues from Imperial College London, TU Vienna, University of Geneva, and the Polish Academy of Sciences just appeared in the new RSC journal Molecular Systems Design & Engineering. The paper illustrates design principles relevant for strong two-photon absorbers. The best two-photon absorption is obtained by using a symmetric D-A-D arrangement with sufficiently strong donors.

Continue reading →

Talk: Excited states of transition metal complexes

Felix

On Thursday, 20/06, Felix will give a talk at the CECAM workshop on Theoretical and Computational Inorganic Photochemistry in Toulouse. This talk will discuss how excited states in transition metal complexes can be assigned completely automatically without ever looking at an orbital. It is shown how this method can be used for a high-throughput analysis of excited states as well as for benchmarking excited-state computations. Finally, a quick outlook will be given on how correlation effects can be visualised using a newly developed tool for computing conditional electron/hole densities.

You can download the slides here:

Download

Preprint: Details in the surface hopping algorithm

Felix

Having discussed the influence of electronic structure methods in surface hopping dynamics in the last post and paper, we can now proceed to the surface hopping algorithm itself. To our surprise, algorithmic details such as the decoherence correction (energy-based decoherence or augmented FSSH), momentum rescaling and the treatment of frustrated hops can make a big difference. This is what we investigated in our new preprint “Strong Influence of Decoherence Corrections and Momentum Rescaling in Surface Hopping Dynamics of Transition Metal Complexes” available on ChemArxiv.

To have a well-defined reference, we used our new implementation of vibronic coupling models for surface hopping, which allows us to have a one-to-one comparison with accurate quantum dynamics computed at the MCTDH level of theory. As model system, we used a rhenium complex and studied its ultrafast intersystem crossing dynamics from the singlet to the triplet manifold following previous studies by our collaborators in Strasbourg [JCTC (2017), PCCP (2018)].