Large molecule anharmonic vibrational

For large molecules it is no longer feasible to carry out the complete anharmonic vibrational analysis implied by Equation 12.16. One is forced to the approximate relation, Equation 12.17, which seems to work pretty well in spite of the criticisms discussed above. Numerous examples abound in the literature. The interested student is referred to the review of Hansen. 

This chapter is devoted to tunneling effects observed in vibration-rotation spectra of isolated molecules and dimers. The relative simplicity of these systems permits one to treat them in terms of multidimensional PES s and even to construct these PES s by using the spectroscopic data. Modern experimental techniques permit the study of these simple systems at superlow temperatures where tunneling prevails over thermal activation. The presence of large-amplitude anharmonic motions in these systems, associated with weak (e.g., van der Waals) forces, requires the full power of quantitative multidimensional tunneling theory. 

Henry s group is also involved in theoretical studies to determine sources of local mode overtone intensity. These investigators have developed a very successful approach that uses their harmonically coupled anharmonic oscillator local mode model to obtain the vibrational wavefunctions, and ab initio calculations to obtain the dipole moment functions. The researchers have applied these calculations to relatively large molecules with different types of X-H oscillator. Recently they have compared intensities from their simple model to intensities from sophisticated variational calculations for the small molecules H20 and H2CO. For example, for H2CO they generated a dipole moment function in terms of all six vibrational degrees of freedom.244 This comparison has allowed them to determine the quality of basis set needed to calculate dipole moment... 

First-principles calculations of anharmonic vibrational spectroscopy of large molecules... 

State calculations. With the extensions provided, the method can be applied to the full Watson Hamiltonian [51] for the vibrational problem. The efficiency of the method depends greatly on the nature of the anharmonic potential that represents couphng between different vibrational modes. In favorable cases, the latter can be represented as a low-order polynomial in the normal-mode displacements. When this is not the case, the computational effort increases rapidly. The Cl-VSCF is expected to scale as or worse with the number N of vibrational modes. The most favorable situation is obtained when only pairs of normal modes are coupled in the terms of the polynomial representation of the potential. The VSCF-Cl method was implemented in MULTIMODE [47,52], a code for anharmonic vibrational spectra that has been used extensively. MULTIMODE has been successfully applied to relatively large molecules such as benzene [53]. Applications to much larger systems could be difficult in view of the unfavorable scalability trend mentioned above. 

Perturbation theory has been applied to anharmonic calculations of spectroscopy from ab initio potentials in a large number of studies [19-25,115-121]. In nearly all cases so far, second-order perturbation theory was employed. The representation of the anharmonic potential generally used in these studies is a polynomial in the normal modes, most often a quartic force field. A code implementing this vibrational method was recently incorporated by V. Barone in gaussian [24]. Calculations were carried out for relatively large molecules, such as pyrrole and furan [25], uracil and thiouracil [118], and azabenzenes [119]. We note that in addition to spectroscopy, the ab initio perturbation theoretic algorithms were also applied to the calculation of thermodynamic properties... 

Major progress was made in recent years in ab initio calculations of anharmonic vibrational spectroscopy. One of the important indicators is the good agreement with experiment found in calculations for relatively large molecules, having more than 10 atoms (24 vibrational modes). Treatment of such large systems at a good anharmonic... 

First-principles calculations of anharmonic vibrational spectroscopy of large molecules 187 Table 9.4 OH-stretching overtone excitation frequencies for HNO3... 

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