Approximations , Adiabatic nonadiabatic

Key words Adiabatic - Nonadiabatic - Potential-energy surface - Born-Oppenheimer approximation... 

His most outstanding achievements were high-accuracy quantum-mechanical treatments of 2-, 3- and 4-electron molecular systems. By developing novel approximate schemes at Bom-Oppenheimer, adiabatic, nonadiabatic and relativistic levels, he achieved an accuracy matching the best contemporary experiments. With his coworkers he developed original methods based on explicitly correlated wavefimctions and, using these methods, obtained the most accurate theoretical results for such systems as H2 in its ground and excited states, Hs", HeH, H3, He2, He2 and LiH. These results still serve as benchmarks for both theory and experiment. 

Obviously, the BO or the adiabatic states only serve as a basis, albeit a useful basis if they are determined accurately, for such evolving states, and one may ask whether another, less costly, basis could be Just as useful. The electron nuclear dynamics (END) theory [1-4] treats the simultaneous dynamics of electrons and nuclei and may be characterized as a time-dependent, fully nonadiabatic approach to direct dynamics. The END equations that approximate the time-dependent Schrddinger equation are derived by employing the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP). 

Thus, the neglect of the off-diagonal matrix elements allows the change from mixed states of the nuclear subsystem to pure ones. The motion of the nuclei leads only to the deformation of the electronic distribution and not to transitions between different electronic states. In other words, a stationary distribution of electrons is obtained for each instantaneous position of the nuclei, that is, the elechons follow the motion of the nuclei adiabatically. The distribution of the nuclei is described by the wave function x (R i) in the potential V + Cn , known as the proper adiabatic approximation [41]. The off-diagonal operators C n in the matrix C, which lead to transitions between the states v / and t / are called operators of nonadiabaticity and the potential V = (R) due to the mean field of all the electrons of the system is called the adiabatic potential. 

The problem of nonadiabatic tunneling in the Landau-Zener approximation has been solved by Ovchinnikova [1965]. For further refinements of the theory beyond this approximation see Laing et al. [1977], Holstein [1978], Coveney et al. [1985], Nakamura [1987]. The nonadiabatic transition probability for a more general case of dissipative tunneling is derived in appendix B. We quote here only the result for the dissipationless case obtained in the Landau-Zener limit. When < F (Xe), the total transition probability is the product of the adiabatic tunneling rate, calculated in the previous sections, and the Landau-Zener-Stueckelberg-like factor... 

It is to be emphasized that, despite the formal similarity, the physical problems are different. Moreover, in general, diabatic coupling is not small, unlike the tunneling matrix element, and this circumstance does not allow one to apply the noninteracting blip approximation. So even having been formulated in the standard spin-boson form, the problem still remains rather sophisticated. In particular, it is difficult to explore the intermediate region between nonadiabatic and adiabatic transition. 

It has been shown that there is a two-dimensional cut of the PES such that the MEP lies completely within it. The coordinates in this cut are 4, and a linear combination of qs-q-j. This cut is presented in fig. 64, along with the MEP. Motion along the reaction path is adiabatic with respect to the fast coordinates q -q and nonadiabatic in the space of the slow coordinates q -qi-Nevertheless, since the MEP has a small curvature, the deviation of the extremal trajectory from it is small. This small curvature approximation has been intensively used earlier [Skodje et al. 1981 Truhlar et al. 1982], in particular for calculating tunneling splittings in (HF)2- The rate constant of reaction (6.45a) found in this way is characterized by the values T<. = 20-25 K, = 10 -10 s , = 1-4 kcal/mol above T, which compare well with the experiment. 

Now we make the usual assumption in nonadiabatic transition theory that non-adiabaticity is essential only in the vicinity of the crossing point where e(Qc) = 0- Therefore, if the trajectory does not cross the dividing surface Q = Qc, its contribution to the path integral is to a good accuracy described by adiabatic approximation, i.e., e = ad Hence the real part of partition function, Zq is the same as in the adiabatic approximation. Then the rate constant may be written as... 

A and A = 0.1 eV. The adiabatic ground potential energy surface is shown in Fig. 11. The present results (solid line) are in good agreement with the quantum mechanical ones (solid circles). The minimum energy crossing point (MECP) is conventionally used as the transition state and the transition probability is represented by the value at this point. This is called the MECP approximation and does not work well, as seen in Fig. 10. This means that the coordinate dependence of the nonadiabatic transmission probability on the seam surface is important and should be taken into account as is done explicitly in Eq. (18). 

The aim of this work is to obtain the four lowest E curves and wavefunctions of BH at the same level of accuracy and to bring out the interplay of ionic, Rydberg and valence states at energies and internuclear distances which were not previously investigated. We have therefore made use of a method, already put forward by us [16,17] to determine at once quasi-diabatic and adiabatic states, potential energy cnrves and approximate nonadiabatic couplings. We have analogously determined the first three E+ states, of which only the lowest had been theoretically studied... 

Fig. 3. Vibrational population distributions of N2 formed in associative desorption of N-atoms from ruthenium, (a) Predictions of a classical trajectory based theory adhering to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, (b) Predictions of a molecular dynamics with electron friction theory taking into account interactions of the reacting molecule with the electron bath, (c) Born—Oppenheimer potential energy surface, (d) Experimentally-observed distribution. The qualitative failure of the electronically adiabatic approach provides some of the best available evidence that chemical reactions at metal surfaces are subject to strong electronically nonadiabatic influences. (See Refs. 44 and 45.)...

The effects of deviations from the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (BOA) due to the interaction of the electron in the sub-barrier region with the local vibrations of the donor or the acceptor were considered for electron transfer processes in Ref. 68. It was shown that these effects are of importance for long-distance electron transfer since in this case the time when the electron is in the sub-barrier region may be long as compared to the period of the local vibration.68 A similar approach has been used in Ref. 65 to treat non-adiabatic effects in the sub-barrier region in atom transfer processes. However, nonadiabatic effects in the classically attainable region may also be of importance in atom transfer processes. In the harmonic approximation, when these effects are taken into account exactly, they manifest themselves in the noncoincidence of the... 

In this section we shall give the connections between the nonadiabatic and damped treatments of Fermi resonances [53,73] within the strong anharmonic coupling framework and the former theory of Witkowski and Wojcik [74] which is adiabatic and undamped, involving implicitly the exchange approximation (approximation later defined in Section IV.C). 

We kept the same structure in Figs. 8(a) and 8(b), but the spectra were computed for a greater value a0 = 1.2. As may be seen, some differences between the adiabatic and nonadiabatic spectral densities appear in all cases, whether applying the exchange approximation or not. Within the exchange approximation, Fig. 8(b), these discrepancies may be safely attributed to the... 

In the previous section, we discussed the calculation of the PESs needed in Eq. (2.16a) as well as the nonadiabatic coupling terms of Eqs. (2.16b) and (2.16c). We have noted that in the diabatic representation the off-diagonal elements of Eq. (2.16a) are responsible for the coupling between electronic states while Dp and Gp vanish. In the adiabatic representation the opposite is true The off-diagonal elements of Eq. (2.16a) vanish while Du and Gp do not. In this representation, our calculation of the nonadiabatic coupling is approximate because we assume that Gp is negligible and we make an approximation in the calculation of Dp. (See end of Section n.A for more details.)... 

Equation (5.23) is still based on the adiabatic system. A better, but still approximate, result can be produced from the nonadiabatic Semenov model where... 

For k(r) we shall assume at first, as in (19), that the reaction is adiabatic at the distance of closest approach, r = a, and that it is joined there to the nonadiabatic solution which varies as exp(-ar). The adiabatic and nonadiabatic solutions can be joined smoothly. For example, one could try to generalize to the present multi-dimensional potential energy surfaces, a Landau-Zener type treatment (41). For simplicity, however, we will join the adiabatic and nonadiabatic expressions at r = a. We subsequently consider another approximation in which the reaction is treated as being nonadiabatic even at r = a. 

Let us first consider the population probability of the initially excited adiabatic state of Model 1 depicted in Fig. 17. Within the first 20 fs, the quantum-mechanical result is seen to decay almost completely to zero. The result of the QCL calculation matches the quantum data only for about 10 fs and is then found to oscillate around the quantum result. A closer analysis of the calculation shows that this flaw of the QCL method is mainly caused by large momentum shifts associated with the divergence of the nonadiabatic couplings F = We therefore chose to resort to a simpler approximation... 

Although the phase space of the nonadiabatic photoisomerization system is largely irregular, Fig. 36A demonstrates that the time evolution of a long trajectory can be characterized by a sequence of a few types of quasi-periodic orbits. The term quasi-periodic refers here to orbits that are close to an unstable periodic orbit and are, over a certain timescale, exactly periodic in the slow torsional mode and approximately periodic in the high-frequency vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom. In Fig. 36B, these orbits are schematically drawn as lines in the adiabatic potential-energy curves Wo and Wi. The first class of quasi-periodic orbits we wish to consider are orbits that predominantly... 

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