Gradients potential energy surfaces

Philipsen P H T, te Velde G and Baerends E J 1994 The effect of density-gradient corrections for a molecule-surface potential energy surface. Slab calculations on Cu(100)c(2x2)-C0 Chem. Phys. Lett. 226 583... 

The steepest descent method is a first order minimizer. It uses the first derivative of the potential energy with respect to the Cartesian coordinates. The method moves down the steepest slope of the interatomic forces on the potential energy surface. The descent is accomplished by adding an increment to the coordinates in the direction of the negative gradient of the potential energy, or the force. 

For multi-dimensional potential energy surfaces a convenient measure of the gradient vector is the root-mean-square (RMS) gradient described by... 

Maxima, minima and saddle points are stationary points on a potential energy surface characterized by a zero gradient. A (first-order) saddle point is a maximum along just one direction and in general this direction is not known in advance. It must therefore be determined during the course of the optimization. Numerous algorithms have been proposed, and I will finish this chapter by describing a few of the more popular ones. 

Analytical gradient energy expressions have been reported for many of the standard models discussed in this book. Analytical second derivatives are also widely available. The main use of analytical gradient methods is to locate stationaiy points on potential energy surfaces. So, for example, in order to find an expression for the gradient of a closed-shell HF-LCAO wavefunction we might start with the electronic energy expression from Chapter 6,... 

It should be clear from our discussion of potential energy surfaces that we have to examine the gradient of the electron density and the matrix of second derivatives, in order to make progress. The gradient of the electron density P(r) is, in Cartesian coordinates,... 

Smooth COSMO solvation model. We have recently extended our smooth COSMO solvation model with analytical gradients [71] to work with semiempirical QM and QM/MM methods within the CHARMM and MNDO programs [72, 73], The method is a considerably more stable implementation of the conventional COSMO method for geometry optimizations, transition state searches and potential energy surfaces [72], The method was applied to study dissociative phosphoryl transfer reactions [40], and native and thio-substituted transphosphorylation reactions [73] and compared with density-functional and hybrid QM/MM calculation results. The smooth COSMO method can be formulated as a linear-scaling Green s function approach [72] and was applied to ascertain the contribution of phosphate-phosphate repulsions in linear and bent-form DNA models based on the crystallographic structure of a full turn of DNA in a nucleosome core particle [74],... 

The (nonlocal) polarizabilities are important DFT reactivity descriptors. But, how are polarizabilities related to chemistry As stated above, an essential ingredient of the free energy surface is the potential energy surface and, in particular, its gradients. In a classical description of the nuclei, they determine the many possible atomic trajectories. Thanks to Feynman, one knows a very elegant and exact formulation of the force between the atoms namely [22,23]... 

The Hessian and gradient can also be used to trace out streambeds connecting local minima to transition states. In doing so, one utilizes a local harmonic description of the potential energy surface... 

The interpretation of p, then, in terms of the gradients of the potential energy surfaces in electrode kinetics seems a reasonable one, and it does lead to values of P that are in fairly good accord with those observed. They are always near one-half but seldom exactly one-half, and that is just what potential energy surfaces indicate when calculations are made. 

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