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Femtosecond and attosecond X-ray transient absorption experiments are becoming increasingly sophisticated tools for probing nuclear dynamics. In this work, we explore and develop theoretical tools needed for interpretation of such spectra,in order to characterize the vibrational coherences that result from ionizing a molecule in a strong IR field. Ab initio data for F2 is combined with simulations of nuclear dynamics, in order to simulate time-resolved X-ray absorption spectra for vibrational wavepackets after coherent ionization at 0 K and at finite temperature. Dihalogens pose rather difficult electronic structure problems, and the issues encountered in this work will be reflective of those encountered with any core–valence excitation simulation when a bond is breaking. The simulations reveal a strong dependence of the X-ray absorption maximum on the locations of the vibrational wave packets. A Fourier transform of the simulated signal shows features at the overtone frequencies of both the neutral and the cation, which reflect spatial interferences of the vibrational eigenstates. This provides a direct path for implementing ultrafast X-ray spectroscopic methods to visualize coherent nuclear dynamics.

A summary of the technical advances that are incorporated in the fourth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program is provided, covering approximately the last seven years. These include developments in density functional theory methods and algorithms, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) property evaluation, coupled cluster and perturbation theories, methods for electronically excited and open-shell species, tools for treating extended environments, algorithms for walking on potential surfaces, analysis tools, energy and electron transfer modelling, parallel computing capabilities, and graphical user interfaces. In addition, a selection of example case studies that illustrate these capabilities is given. These include extensive benchmarks of the comparative accuracy of modern density functionals for bonded and non-bonded interactions, tests of attenuated second order Møller-Plesset (MP2) methods for intermolecular interactions, a variety of parallel performance benchmarks, and tests of the accuracy of implicit solvation models. Some specific chemical examples include calculations on the strongly correlated Cr2 dimer, exploring zeolite-catalysed ethane dehydrogenation, energy decomposition analysis of a charged ter-molecular complex arising from glycerol photoionisation, and natural transition orbitals for a Frenkel exciton state in a nine-unit model of a self-assembling nanotube.

A simplified approach to treating the electron correlation energy is suggested in which only the alpha-beta component of the second order Moller-Plesset energy is evaluated, and then scaled by an empirical factor which is suggested to be 1.3. This scaled opposite spin second order energy (SOS-MP@) yields results for relative energies and derivative properties that are statistically improved over the conventional MP2 method. Furthermore, the SOS-MP2 energy can be evaluated without the 5th order computational steps associated with MP2 theory, even without exploiting any spatial locality. A 4th order algorithm is given for evaluating the opposite spin MP2 energy using auxiliary basis expansions, and a Laplace aproach, and timing comparisons are given.

The process of a local excitation evolving into an intramolecular charge-separated state is followed and compared for several systems by directly simulating the time propagation of the electronic wavefunction. The wavefunction and Hamiltonian are handled using the extended second-order algebraic diagrammatic construction (ADC(2)-x), which explicitly accounts for electron correlation in the dynamic many-particle state. The details of the charge separation can be manipulated according to the chemical composition of the system; atoms which dope the conjugated system with either particles or holes are shown to effect whether the particle or hole is more mobile. Initially, the charges oscillate between the ends of linear molecules (with different rates), separating periodically, but, at long times, both charges tend to spread over the whole molecule. Charge separation is also shown to occur for asymmetric systems, where it may eventually be experimentally feasible to excite a localized resonance (nonstationary state) on one end of the molecule preferentially and follow the ensuing dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a method for studying the movement of electrons and energy within and between electronically excited molecules. The dynamically changing state is a many-electron wavepacket, for which we numerically integrate the Schrödinger equation using the ADC(2) effective Hamiltonian for the particle-hole propagator. We develop the tools necessary for following the separate motions of the particles and holes. Total particle and hole densities can be used to give an overview of the dynamics, which can be atomically decomposed in a Mulliken fashion, or individual particle and hole states give a more detailed look at the structure of an excitation. We apply our model to a neon chain, as an illustrative example, projecting an excited eigenstate of an isolated atom onto the coupled system as the initial state. In addition to demonstrating our propagation and analysis machinery, the results show a dramatic difference in excitation-energy transfer rates as a consequence of initial polarization. Furthermore, already in a system with three constituents, an important aspect of multiple coupled systems appears, in that one absorbing system essentially shields another, changing the effective sitewise coupling parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present here an algorithm for computing stable, well-defined localized orthonormal virtual orbitals which depend smoothly on nuclear coordinates. The algorithm is very fast, limited only by diagonalization of two matrices with dimension the size of the number of virtual orbitals. Furthermore, we require no more than quadratic (in the number of electrons) storage. The basic premise behind our algorithm is that one can decompose any given atomic-orbital (AO) vector space as a minimal basis space (which includes the occupied and valence virtual spaces) and a hard-virtual (HV) space (which includes everything else). The valence virtual space localizes easily with standard methods, while the hard-virtual space is constructed to be atom centered and automatically local. The orbitals presented here may be computed almost as quickly as projecting the AO basis onto the virtual space and are almost as local (according to orbital variance), while our orbitals are orthonormal (rather than redundant and nonorthogonal). We expect this algorithm to find use in local-correlation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new attenuator function is presented which can be applied to the Coulomb operator. The slope and the curvature of the attenuated potential are more significant than its value.

A definition for radical and general m-fold multiradical character of molecular systems was formulated. A measure of general multiradical character was proposed as a logical extension of the concepts that drive single determinant model chemistry.

A variant of coupled-cluster theory is described here, wherein the degrees of freedom are fluctuations of fragments between internally correlated states. The effects of intra-fragment correlation on the inter-fragment interaction are pre-computed and permanently folded into an effective Hamiltonian, thus avoiding redundant evaluations of local relaxations associated with coupled fluctuations. A companion article shows that a low-scaling step may be used to cast the electronic Hamiltonians of real systems into the form required. Two proof-of-principle demonstrations are presented here for non-covalent interactions. One uses harmonic oscillators, for which accuracy and algorithm structure can be carefully controlled in comparisons. The other uses small electronic systems (Be atoms) to demonstrate compelling accuracy and efficiency, also when inter-fragment electron exchange and charge transfer must be handled. Since the cost of the global calculation does not depend directly on the correlation models used for the fragments, this should provide a way to incorporate difficult electronic structure problems into large systems. This framework opens a promising path for building tunable, systematically improvable methods to capture properties of systems interacting with a large number of other systems. The extension to excited states is also straightforward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show here that the Hamiltonian for an electronic system may be written exactly in terms of fluctuation operators that transition constituent fragments between internally correlated states, accounting rigorously for inter-fragment electron exchange and charge transfer. Familiar electronic structure approaches can be applied to the renormalised Hamiltonian. For efficiency, the basis for each fragment can be truncated, removing high-energy local arrangements of electrons from consideration, and effectively defining collective coordinates for the fragments. For a large number of problems (especially for non-covalently interacting fragments), this has the potential to fold the majority of electron correlation into the effective Hamiltonian, and it should provide a robust approach to incorporating difficult electronic structure problems into large systems. The number of terms in the exactly transformed Hamiltonian formally scales quartically with system size, but this can be reduced to quadratic in the mesoscopic regime, to within an arbitrary error tolerance. Finally, all but a linear-scaling number of these terms may be efficiently decomposed in terms of electrostatic interactions between a linear-scaling number of pre-computed transition densities. In a companion article, this formalism is applied to an excitonic variant of coupled-cluster theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The background in X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy data originates, partially, from inelastically scattered photoelectrons. In fact, the current theoretical methods for calculating the background intensity are based on electron energy losses. However, a critical part of the experimental signal, which is known as the Shirley background, cannot be described within the current formalisms. This suggests that the Shirley electrons are not associated with energy losses of photoelectrons and must originate from a different photoexcitation phenomenon with a cross section of its own. We propose a mechanism based on core channeling as the physical origin of the Shirley signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As experimental techniques begin to probe electronic motions in increasing detail, the need is arising for compact and informative visualisations of simulations of such processes. The inherent challenge is that a full many-electron wavefunction is a high-dimensional object, representing the complicated correlations of strongly repulsive bodies in a small molecular volume. A general procedure is needed to distill this to a smaller amount of information that does not rely on any specific level of approximation. The result should allow for easy and intuitive interpretation while drawing out nontrivial aspects of the underlying many-body dynamics, such as the complex phase information inherent of a nonstationary state. Current visualisation schemes based on physical observables or the qualitative information contained in simple wavefunctions, such as time-dependent configuration-interaction-singles (TD-CIS) and time-dependent self-consistent-field (TD-SCF), are discussed. This information is compared to an analysis based on the one-body reduced density operator (1-RDO), which is well-defined for general wavefunctions. It is seen that the distinction between two paradigms of many-body dynamics, electron transport and energy transport, is reflected in the coherences of a difference-1-RDO, or lack thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses nonbonded interactions, not bonding orbitals and primarily determine observed geometries. Prediction of equilibrium geometries and inversion barriers; Energy changes in the localized electronic features as a function of bond angle; Grouping of features into contracting and spreading forces.

Utilizing the sparsity of the electronic structure problem, fragmentation methods have been researched for decades with great success, pushing the limits of ab initio quantum chemistry ever further. Recently, this set of methods has been expanded to include a fundamentally different approach called excitonic renormalization, providing promising initial results. It builds a supersystem Hamiltonian in a second-quantized-like representation from transition-density tensors of isolated fragments, contracted with biorthogonalized molecular integrals. This makes the method fully modular in terms of the quantum chemical methods applied to each fragment and enables massive truncation of the state-space required. Proof-of-principle tests have previously shown that an excitonically renormalized Hamiltonian can efficiently scale to hundreds of fragments, but the ad hoc approach to building the Hamiltonian was not scalable to larger fragments. On the other hand, initial tests of the originally proposed modular Hamiltonian build, presented here, show the accuracy to be poor on account of its non-Hermitian character. In this study, we bridge the gap between these with an operator expansion that is shown to converge rapidly, tending toward a Hermitian Hamiltonian while retaining the modularity, yielding an accurate, scalable method. The accuracy is tested here for a beryllium dimer. At distances near equilibrium and longer, the zeroth-order method is comparable to coupled-cluster singles, doubles, and perturbative triples and the first-order method is comparable to full configuration interaction (FCI). The second-order method agrees with FCI for distances well up the inner repulsive wall of the potential. Deviations occurring at shorter bond distances are discussed along with approaches to scaling to larger fragments., (© 2024 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.)