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Though electret materials are attractive for realizing flexible mechanoelectrical devices, these materials are typically solid films. Here, the authors report stretchable ‘liquid-electret’ devices consisting solvent-free liquid porphyrins that show piezoelectric and electroacoustic functionality.

Triplet dynamic nuclear polarization (triplet-DNP) is a technique that can obtain high nuclear polarization under moderate conditions. However, in order to obtain practically useful polarization, large single crystals doped with a polarizing agent must be strictly oriented with respect to the magnetic field to sharpen the electron spin resonance (ESR) spectra, which is a fatal problem that prevents its application to truly useful biomolecular targets. Instead of this conventional physical approach of controlling crystal orientation, here, we propose a chemical approach, i.e., molecular design of polarizing agents; pentacene molecules, the most typical triplet-DNP polarizing agent, are modified so as to make the triplet electron distribution wider and more isotropic without loss of the triplet polarization. The thiophene-modified pentacene exhibits a sharper and stronger ESR spectrum than the parent pentacene, and state-of-the-art quantum chemical calculations revealed that the direction of the spin polarization is altered by the modification with thiophene moieties and the size of D and E parameters are reduced from parent pentacene due to the partial delocalization of spin densities on the thiophene moieties. The triplet-DNP with the new polarizing agent successfully exceeds the previous highest ¹H polarization of glassy materials by a factor of 5. This demonstrates the feasibility of a polarizing agent that can surpass pentacene, the best polarizing agent for more than 30 y since triplet-DNP was first reported, in the unoriented state. This work provides a pathway toward practically useful high nuclear polarization of various biomolecules by triplet-DNP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report an extension of our previous development that incorporated quantum-chemical density ma-trix renormalization group (DMRG) into the complete active space second-order perturbation theory (CASPT2) [Y. Kurashige and T. Yanai, J. Chem. Phys. 135, 094104 (2011)]. In the previous study, the combined theory, referred to as DMRG-CASPT2, was built upon the use of pseudo-canonical molecular orbitals (PCMOs) for one-electron basis. Within the PCMO basis, the construction of the four-particle reduced density matrix (4-RDM) using DMRG can be greatly facilitated because of simplicity in the multiplication of 4-RDM and diagonal Fock matrix in the CASPT2 equation. In this work, we develop an approach to use more suited orbital basis in DMRG-CASPT2 calcu-lations, e.g., localized molecular orbitals, in order to extend the domain of applicability. Because the multiplication of 4-RDM and generalized Fock matrix is no longer simple in general orbitals, an approximation is made to it using the cumulant reconstruction neglecting higher-particle cumu-lants. Also, we present the details of the algorithm to compute 3-RDM of the DMRG wavefunction as an extension of the 2-RDM algorithm of Zgid et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 128, 144115 (2008)] and Chan et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 128, 144117 (2008)]. The performance of the extended DMRG-CASPT2 approach was examined for large-scale multireference systems, such as low-lying excited states of long-chain polyenes and isomerization potential of {[Cu(NH3)3]2O2}2+. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second-order perturbation theory with general multiconfiguration self-consistent field reference functions (GMC-PT) and Dunning's augmented correlation-consistent polarized valence quadruple- zeta (aug-cc-pVQZ) basis set is used to investigate the most stable structure of the SiC3 molecule. The results showed that a closed-shell rhomboidal C(super 2v) isomer with a C-C transannular bond (2s) was most stable.