Direct molecular dynamics Hamiltonian model

For a complete treatment of a laser-driven molecule, one must solve the many-body, multidimensional time-dependent Schrodinger equation (TDSE). This represents a tremendous task and direct wavepacket simulations of nuclear and electronic motions under an intense laser pulse is presently restricted to a few bodies (at most three or four) and/or to a model of low dimensionality [27]. For a more general treatment, an approximate separation of variables between electrons (fast subsystem) and nuclei (slow subsystem) is customarily made, in the spirit of the BO approximation. To lay out the ideas underlying this approximation as adapted to field-driven molecular dynamics, we will consider from now on a molecule consisting of Nn nuclei (labeled a, p,...) and Ne electrons (labeled /, j,...), with position vectors Ro, and r respectively, defined in the center of mass (rotating) body-fixed coordinate system, in a classical field E(f) of the form Eof t) cos cot). The full semiclassical length gauge Hamiltonian is written, for a system of electrons and nuclei, as [4]... 

While the McMillan-Mayer theory (Section 4) prescribes the iiabir) as functionals of the Hamiltonian of a BO-level model, little has been learned from this sort of direct approach. The main contributions are an analytical study of charged hard spheres in an uncharged hard-sphere solvent by Stell, " Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics studies of somewhat more realistic models, " " and a study using the mean spherical approximation (Section 7.3). ... 

The QM/MM Hamiltonian can be used to cany out Molecular Dynamics simulations of a complex system. In the case of liquid interfaces, the simulation box contains the solute and solvent molecules and one must apply appropriate periodic boundary conditions. Typically, for air-water interface simulations, we use a cubic box with periodic boundary conditions in the X and Y directions, whereas for liquid/liquid interfaces, we use a rectangle cuboid interface with periodic boundary conditions in the three directions. An example of simulation box for a liquid-liquid interface is illustrated in Fig. 11.1. The solute s wave function is computed on the fly at each time step of the simulation using the terms in the whole Hamiltonian that explicitly depend on the solute s electronic coordinates (the Born-Oppenheimer approximation is assumed in this model). To accelerate the convergence of the wavefunction calculation, the initial guess in the SCF iterative procedure is taken from the previous step in the simulation, or better, using an extrapolated density matrix from the last three or four steps [39]. The forces acting on QM nuclei and on MM centers are evaluated analytically, and the classical equations of motion are solved to obtain a set of new atomic positions and velocities. 

The classical microscopic description of molecular processes leads to a mathematical model in terms of Hamiltonian differential equations. In principle, the discretization of such systems permits a simulation of the dynamics. However, as will be worked out below in Section 2, both forward and backward numerical analysis restrict such simulations to only short time spans and to comparatively small discretization steps. Fortunately, most questions of chemical relevance just require the computation of averages of physical observables, of stable conformations or of conformational changes. The computation of averages is usually performed on a statistical physics basis. In the subsequent Section 3 we advocate a new computational approach on the basis of the mathematical theory of dynamical systems we directly solve a... 

Quadrupolar interactions can offer direct information on the dynamics of organics within zeolite crystals. Eckman and Vega (304) studied the 2H quadrupolar echo decay in perdeuterated p-xylene adsorbed on zeolite ZSM-5. The deuterium quadrupolar interaction usually dominates the spin Hamiltonian, so that the powder pattern can be used as a test for models of molecular motion. At -75°C and 25°C typical rigid-lattice spectra were obtained. At 100°C however, the resonance arising from the aromatic deuterons was motionally narrowed, while the methyl resonance was not, The authors conclude that p-xylene molecules reorient about an axis which passes through the C3 axes of the methyl groups. 

The results presented in this chapter show that the use of proper effective models, in combination with calculations based on the exact vibrational Hamiltonian, constitutes a promising approach to study the laser driven vibrational dynamics of polyatomic molecules. In this context, the MCTDH method is an invaluable tool as it allows to compute the laser driven dynamics of polyatomic molecules with a high accuracy. However, our models still contain simplifications that prevent a direct comparison of our results with potential experiments. First, the rotational motion of the molecule was not explicitly described in the present work. The inclusion of the rotation in the description of the dynamics of the molecule is expected to be important in several ways. First, even at low energies, the inclusion of the rotational structure would result in a more complicated system with different selection rules. In addition, the orientation of the molecule with respect to the laser field polarization would make the control less efficient because of the rotational averaging of the laser-molecule interaction and the possible existence of competing processes. On the other hand, the combination of the laser control of the molecular alignment/orientation with the vibrational control proposed in this work could allow for a more complete control of the dynamics of the molecule. A second simplification of our models concerns the initial state chosen for the simulations. We have considered a molecule in a localized coherent superposition of vibrational eigenstates but we have not studied the preparation of this state. We note here that a control scheme for the localiza-... 

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