Anharmonicity polyatomics

The vibrational term values for a polyatomic anharmonic oscillator with only nondegenerate vibrations are modified from the harmonic oscillator values of Equation (6.41) to... 

For diatomic molecules, B0 is the rotational constant to use with equation (10.125), while Be applies to equation (10.124). They are related by Bq = Be 2 - The moment of inertia 70(kg-m2) is related to 50(cm ) through the relationship /0 = h/ 8 x 10 27r22 oc), with h and c expressed in SI units. For polyatomic molecules, /a, /b, and Iq are the moments of inertia to use with Table 10.4 where the rigid rotator approximation is assumed. For diatomic molecules, /0 is used with Table 10.4 to calculate values to which we add the anharmonicity and nonrigid rotator corrections. 

For diatomic molecules, wo is the vibrational constant to use with equation (10.125) for calculating anharmonicity and nonrigid rotator corrections, while wc and Cjexe apply to equation (10.124). They are related by 2>o = wc - For polyatomic molecules, w... 

Isotope effects on anharmonic corrections to ZPE drop off rapidly with mass and are usually neglected. The ideas presented above obviously carry over to exchange equilibria involving polyatomic molecules. Unfortunately, however, there are very few polyatomics on which spectroscopic vibrational analysis has been carried in enough detail to furnish spectroscopic values for Go and o)exe. For that reason anharmonic corrections to ZPE s of polyatomics have been generally ignored, but see Section 5.6.3.2 for a discussion of an exception also theoretical (quantum package) calculations of anharmonic constants are now practical (see above), and in the future one can expect more attention to anharmonic corrections of ZPE s. 

However, in polyatomic molecules, transitions to excited states involving two vibrational modes at once (combination bands) are also weakly allowed, and are also affected by the anharmonicity of the potential. The role of combination bands in the NIR can be significant. As has been noted, the only functional groups likely to contribute to the NIR spectrum directly as overtone absorptions are those containing C-H, N-H, O-H or similar functionalities. However, in combination with these hydride bond overtone vibrations, contributions from other, lower frequency fundamental bands such as C=0 and C=C can be involved as overtone-combination bands. The effect may not be dramatic in the rather broad and overcrowded NIR absorption spectrum, but it can still be evident and useful in quantitative analysis. 

When exposed to electromagnetic radiation of the appropriate energy, typically in the infrared, a molecule can interact with the radiation and absorb it, exciting the molecule into the next higher vibrational energy level. For the ideal harmonic oscillator, the selection rules are Av = +1 that is, the vibrational energy can only change by one quantum at a time. However, for anharmonic oscillators, weaker overtone transitions due to Av = +2, + 3, etc. may also be observed because of their nonideal behavior. For polyatomic molecules with more than one fundamental vibration, e.g., as seen in Fig. 3.1a for the water molecule, both overtones and... 

Note that to first order this is simply the sum of the fundamental frequencies, after allowing for anharmonicity. This is an oversimplification, because, in fact, combination bands consist of transitions involving simultaneous excitation of two or more normal modes of a polyatomic molecule, and therefore mixing of vibrational states occurs and... 

In principle, one can induce and control unimolecular reactions directly in the electronic ground state via intense IR fields. Note that this resembles traditional thermal unimolecular reactions, in the sense that the dynamics is confined to the electronic ground state. High intensities are typically required in order to climb up the vibrational ladder and induce bond breaking (or isomerization). The dissociation probability is substantially enhanced when the frequency of the field is time dependent, i.e., the frequency must decrease as a function of time in order to accommodate the anharmonicity of the potential. Selective bond breaking in polyatomic molecules is, in addition, complicated by the fact that the dynamics in various bond-stretching coordinates is coupled due to anharmonic terms in the potential. 

The recent progress of computational quantum chemistry has made it possible to get realistic descriptions of vibrational frequencies for polyatomic molecules in solution. The first attempt in this direction was made by Rivail el al. [1] by exploiting a semiempirical QM molecular model coupled with a continuum description of the medium to compute vibrational frequency shifts for molecular solutes. An extension to ab initio QM methods, including the treatment of electron correlation effects and electrical and mechanical anharmonicities, was then proposed [2 1] in the framework of the Polarizable Continuum Model (PCM). 

The earliest anharmonic force field calculations on polyatomic molecules were made by Pliva and co-workers.1-2 More recently, Kuchitsu and Morino and co-workers,4-7 Overend and co-workers,8-10 Cihla and Chedin,11 and Hoy, Mills, and Strey12 have developed the techniques of calculation and applied them to a wide variety of molecules many other workers have reported calculations on particular molecules, as discussed in Section S. A recent review by Pliva12 contains reference to most published calculations on particular molecules up to 1973. 

Table 2 is an extended and re-calculated version of table VI in ref. 5. The values of the anharmonic constants of diatomic molecules as tabulated here are often used to estimate the expected bond-stretching anharmonicity associated with bonds between corresponding pairs of atoms in polyatomic molecules, as discussed in Section 5. 

The relation of the anharmonic force field to the spectroscopic observables for a polyatomic molecule is similar to the calculation described above for a... 

The discussion so far may be summarized as follows. There are two reasons for using curvilinear co-ordinates to represent the anharmonic force field of a polyatomic molecule, despite their apparent complexity. The first is that it is only in this way that we obtain cubic and quartic force constants which are independent of isotopic substitution. The second is that in terms of curvilinear bond-stretching and angle-bending co-ordinates we obtain the simplest expression for the force field, in the sense that cubic and quartic interaction terms are minimized. The first reason is compulsive the second reason is not compulsive, but it does make the curvilinear co-ordinates very desirable. 

The whole of this section has been concerned with the problem of transforming the potential energy V from a representation in geometrically defined internal co-ordinates H to dimensionless normal co-ordinates q, a transformation achieved in the single equation (14) for a diatomic molecule. It will be clear to the reader that programming this transformation is a considerable part of the task of performing an anharmonic calculation on any polyatomic molecule. 

We elected to study coherent up-pumping dynamics in solution-phase metal-hexacarbonyl systems because of their strong vibrational infrared absorption cross sections, relatively simple ground-state spectra, and small (ca. 15 cm ) anharmonic overtone shifts. It was felt that these systems are ideal candidates to demonstrate that population control could be achieved for polyatomic species in solution because the excited state population... 

An alternative approach widely used in polyatomic molecule studies is based on the Golden Rule and a perturbative treatment of the anharmonic coupling (57,62). This approach is not much used for diatomic molecules. In the liquid O2 example cited above, the Hamiltonian must be expanded to 30th order or so to calculate the multiphonon emission rate. But for vibrations of polyatomic molecules, which can always find relatively low-order VER pathways for each VER step, perturbation theory is very useful. In the perturbation approach, the molecule s entire ladder of vibrational excitations is the system and the phonons are the bath. Only lower-order processes are ordinarily needed (57) because polyatomic molecules have many vibrations ranging from higher to lower frequencies and only a small number of phonons, usually one or two, are excited in each VER step. The usual practice is to expand the interaction Hamiltonian (qn, Q) in Equation (2) in powers of normal coordinates (57,62) ... 

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