Conical intersections intersection space

Single surface calculations with proper phase treatment in the adiabatic representation with shifted conical intersection has been performed in polai coordinates. For this calculation, the initial adiabatic wave function tad(9, 4 > o) is obtained by mapping t, to) ittlo polai space using the relations,... 

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]. 

Figure 5, Sketch of a conical intersection. The vectors x and X2 are the GD and DC respectively, that lift the degeneracy of the two adiabatic surfaces, The plane containing these vectors is known as the branching space.

Figure 6. Two-dimensional (top) and 3D (bottom) representations of a peaked (a) and sloped (b) conical intersection topology. There are two directions that lift the degeneracy the GD and the DC. The top figures have energy plotted against the DC while the bottom figures represent the energy plotted in the space of hoth the GD and DC vectors. At a peaked intersection, as shown at the bottom of (a), the probability of recrossing the conical intersection should be small whereas in the case of a sloped intersection [bottom of ( )l, this possibility should be high. [Reproduced from [84] courtesy of Elsevier Publishers.]...

This analysis is heuristic in the sense that the Hilbert spaces in question are in general of large, if not infinite, dimension while we have focused on spaces of dimension four or two. A form of degenerate perturbation theory [3] can be used to demonstrate that the preceding analysis is essentially correct and, to provide the means for locating and characterizing conical intersections. 

By following Section II.B, we shall be more specific about what is meant by strong and weak interactions. It turns out that such a criterion can be assumed, based on whether two consecutive states do, or do not, form a conical intersection or a parabolical intersection (it is important to mention that only consecutive states can form these intersections). The two types of intersections are characterized by the fact that the nonadiabatic coupling terms, at the points of the intersection, become infinite (these points can be considered as the black holes in molecular systems and it is mainly through these black holes that electronic states interact with each other.). Based on what was said so far we suggest breaking up complete Hilbert space of size A into L sub-Hilbert spaces of varying sizes Np,P = 1,..., L where... 

Before we continue with the construction of the sub-Hilbert spaces, we make the following comment Usually, when two given states fomr conical intersections, one thinks of isolated points in configuration space. In fact, conical intersections are not points but form (finite or infinite) seams that cut through the molecular configuration space. However, since our studies are carried out for planes, these planes usually contain isolated conical intersection points only. 

All Np states belonging to the Pth sub-space interact strongly with each other in the sense that each pair of consecutive states have at least one point where they form a Landau-Zener type interaction. In other words, all j = I,... At/> — I form at least at one point in configuration space, a conical (parabolical) intersection. 

As we have seen, the sub-Hilbert spaces are defined for the whole configuration space and this requirement could lead, in certain cases, to situations where it will be necessary to include the complete Hilbert space. However, it frequently happens that the dynamics we intend to study takes place in a given, isolated, region that contains only part of the conical intersection points and the question is whether the effects of the other conical intersections can be ignored ... 

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). 

In case of three conical intersections, we have as many as eight different sets of eigenfunctions, and so on. Thus we have to refer to an additional chai acterization of a given sub-sub-Hilbert space. This characterization is related to the number Nj of conical intersections and the associated possible number of sign flips due to different contours in the relevant region of configuration space, traced by the electronic manifold. 

The general formula and the individual cases as presented in Eq. (97) indicate that indeed the number of conical intersections in a given snb-space and the number of possible sign flips within this sub-sub-Hilbert space are interrelated, similar to a spin J with respect to its magnetic components Mj. In other words, each decoupled sub-space is now characterized by a spin quantum number J that connects between the number of conical intersections in this system and the topological effects which characterize it. 

We are interested in ealculating the diabatie potentials for a region in configuration space, that contains the two conical intersections. According... 

We ended Section XV.A by claiming that the value a(r q = 0.4 A) is only 0.63ic instead of it (thus damaging the two-state quantization requirement) because, as additional studies revealed, of the close locations of two (3,4) conical intersections. In this section, we show that due to these two conical intersections our sub-space has to be extended so that it contains three states, namely, the second, the third, and the fourth states. Once this extension is done, the quantization requirement is restored but for the three states (and not for two states) as will be described next. 

In Section IV, we introduced the topological matrix D [see Eq. (38)] and showed that for a sub-Hilbert space this matrix is diagonal with (-1-1) and (—1) terms a feature that was defined as quantization of the non-adiabatic coupling matrix. If the present three-state system forms a sub-Hilbert space the resulting D matrix has to be a diagonal matrix as just mentioned. From Eq. (38) it is noticed that the D matrix is calculated along contours, F, that surround conical intersections. Our task in this section is to calculate the D matrix and we do this, again, for circular contours. 

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