Conical intersections description

In this section, the adiabatic picture will be extended to include the non-adiabatic terais that couple the states. After this has been done, a diabatic picture will be developed that enables the basic topology of the coupled surfaces to be investigated. Of particular interest are the intersection regions, which may form what are called conical intersections. These are a multimode phenomena, that is, they do not occur in ID systems, and the name comes from their shape— in a special 2D space it has the fomi of a double cone. Finally, a model Flamiltonian will be introduced that can describe the coupled surfaces. This enables a global description of the surfaces, and gives both insight and predictive power to the fomration of conical intersections. More detailed review on conical intersections and their properties can be found in [1,14,65,176-178]. 

The spin in quantum mechanics was introduced because experiments indicated that individual particles are not completely identified in terms of their three spatial coordinates [87]. Here we encounter, to some extent, a similar situation A system of items (i.e., distributions of electrons) in a given point in configuration space is usually described in terms of its set of eigenfunctions. This description is incomplete because the existence of conical intersections causes the electronic manifold to be multivalued. For example, in case of two (isolated) conical intersections we may encounter at a given point m configuration space four different sets of eigenfunctions (see Section Vni). 

As a last example of a molecular system exhibiting nonadiabatic dynamics caused by a conical intersection, we consider a model that recently has been proposed by Seidner and Domcke to describe ultrafast cis-trans isomerization processes in unsaturated hydrocarbons [172]. Photochemical reactions of this type are known to involve large-amplitode motion on coupled potential-energy surfaces [169], thus representing another stringent test for a mixed quantum-classical description that is complementary to Models 1 and II. A number of theoretical investigations, including quantum wave-packet studies [163, 164, 172], time-resolved pump-probe spectra [164, 181], and various mixed... 

To summarize, it has been found that the SH method is able to at least qualitatively describe the complex photoinduced electronic and vibrational relaxation dynamics exhibited by the model problems under consideration. The overall quality of SH calculations is typically somewhat better than the quality of the mean-field trajectory results. In particular, this holds in the case of several curve crossings (see Fig. 2) as well as when the dynamics and the observables of interest are essentially of adiabatic nature— for example, for the calculation of the adiabatic population dynamics associated with a conical intersection (see Figs. 3 and 12). Furthermore, we have briefly discussed various consistency problems of a simple quasi-classical SH description. It has been shown that binned electronic population probabilities and no momentum adjustment for classically forbidden transitions help us to improve this matter. There have been numerous suggestions to further improve the hopping algorithm [70-74] however, the performance of all these variants seems to depend largely on the problem under consideration. 

G. Stock and M. Thoss, Mixed quantum-classical description of the dynamics at conical intersections, in Canonical Intersections, W. Domcke, D. R. Yarkony, and H. Koppel, eds.. World Scientific, Singapore, 2004. 

The import of diabatic electronic states for dynamical treatments of conical intersecting BO potential energy surfaces is well acknowledged. This intersection is characterized by the non-existence of symmetry element determining its location in nuclear space [25]. This problem is absent in the GED approach. Because the symmetries of the cis and trans conformer are irreducible to each other, a regularization method without a correct reaction coordinate does not make sense. The slope at the (conic) intersection is well defined in the GED scheme. Observe, however, that for closed shell structures, the direct coupling of both states is zero. A configuration interaction is necessary to obtain an appropriate description in other words, correlation states such as diradical ones and the full excited BB state in the AA local minimum cannot be left out the scheme. 

On the contrary, the semiclassical approach in the problem of the optical absorption is restricted to a great extent and the adequate description of the phonon-assisted optical bands with a complicated structure caused by the dynamic JTE cannot be done in the framework of this approach [13]. An expressive example is represented by the two-humped absorption band of A —> E <8> e transition. The dip of absorption curve for A —> E <8> e transition to zero has no physical meaning because of the invalidity of the semiclassical approximation for this spectral range due to essentially quantum nature of the density of the vibronic states in the conical intersection of the adiabatic surface. This result is peculiar for the resonance (optical) phenomena in JT systems full discussion of the condition of the applicability of the adiabatic approximation is given in Ref. [13]. 

The radical anion dissociation conical intersection formulation described here seems reasonably complete for a solution environment, at least for the molecule considered. Naturally, refinements of the treatments of the electronic structure and the cavities could be considered, as was mentioned near the conclusion of the Introduction. However, as was noted in the Introduction to Section 3.7.2, other environments, e.g. DNA, are also of interest. Here one could pursue the development of a Poisson-Boltzmann type of description [100] for the inhomogeneous environment. 

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