Electronic states geometry

In many instances tire adiabatic ET rate expression overestimates tire rate by a considerable amount. In some circumstances simply fonning tire tire activated state geometry in tire encounter complex does not lead to ET. This situation arises when tire donor and acceptor groups are very weakly coupled electronically, and tire reaction is said to be nonadiabatic. As tire geometry of tire system fluctuates, tire species do not move on tire lowest potential energy surface from reactants to products. That is, fluctuations into activated complex geometries can occur millions of times prior to a productive electron transfer event. 

If more than one electronic state is involved, then the electronic wave function is free to contain components from all states. For example, for non-adiabatic systems the elecbonic wave function can be expanded in the adiabatic basis set at the nuclear geometry R t)... 

The potential surfaces of the ground and excited states in the vicinity of the conical intersection were calculated point by point, along the trajectory leading from the antiaromatic transition state to the benzene and H2 products. In this calculation, the HH distance was varied, and all other coordinates were optimized to obtain the minimum energy of the system in the excited electronic state ( Ai). The energy of the ground state was calculated at the geometry optimized for the excited state. In the calculation of the conical intersection... 

The situation in singlet A electronic states of triatomic molecules with linear equilibrium geometry is presented in Figme 2. This vibronic structure can be interpreted in a completely analogous way as above for n species. Note that in A electronic states there is a single unique level for K =, but for each other K 0 series there are two levels with a unique character. 

Now, we discuss briefly the situation when one or both of the adiabatic electronic states has/have nonlinear equilibrium geometry. In Figures 6 and 7 we show two characteristic examples, the state of BH2 and NH2, respectively. The BH2 potential curves are the result of ab initio calculations of the present authors [33,34], and those for NH2 are taken from [25]. 

Figure 9. Energy difference (absolute value) between the components of the X II electronic State of HCCS as a function of coordinates p, P2, and y. Curves represent the square root of the second of functions given by Eq. (77) (with e, = —0.011, 2 = 0.013, 8,2 = 0.005325) for fixed values of coordinates p, and P2 (attached at each curve) and variable Y = 4>2 Here y = 0 corresponds to cis-planar geometry and y = 71 to trans-planar geometry. Symbols results of explicit ab initio calculations.

As is the case for diatomic molecules, rotational fine structure of electronic spectra of polyatomic molecules is very similar, in principle, to that of their infrared vibrational spectra. For linear, symmetric rotor, spherical rotor and asymmetric rotor molecules the selection mles are the same as those discussed in Sections 6.2.4.1 to 6.2.4.4. The major difference, in practice, is that, as for diatomics, there is likely to be a much larger change of geometry, and therefore of rotational constants, from one electronic state to another than from one vibrational state to another. 

At the instant of excitation, only electrons are reorganized the heavier nuclei retain their ground-state geometry. The statement of this condition is referred to as the Fmnck-Condon principle. A consequence is that the initially generated excited state will have a non-minimal-energy geometry. 

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