Molecular crystals dynamics

Califano S, Sohettino V and Neto N 1981 Lattice Dynamics of Molecular Crystals (Berlin Springer)... 

DIott D D 1988 Dynamics of molecular crystal vibrations Laser Spectroscopy of Solids 7/ed W Yen (Berlin Springer) pp 167-200... 

Polarons of Molecular Crystal Model by Nonlocal Dynamical Coherent Potential Method... 

In 1985 Car and Parrinello invented a method [111-113] in which molecular dynamics (MD) methods are combined with first-principles computations such that the interatomic forces due to the electronic degrees of freedom are computed by density functional theory [114-116] and the statistical properties by the MD method. This method and related ab initio simulations have been successfully applied to carbon [117], silicon [118-120], copper [121], surface reconstruction [122-128], atomic clusters [129-133], molecular crystals [134], the epitaxial growth of metals [135-140], and many other systems for a review see Ref. 113. 

Contents Lattice Dynamics. - Symmetry. - Inter-molecular Potentials. - Anharmonic Interactions. - Two-Phonon Spectra of Molecular Crystals. -Infrared and Raman Intensities in Molecular Crystals. 

When very high pressures (> 1 GPa) are applied to liquid phases, glasses, or molecular crystals, mobility is reduced and steric effects become more important both in equilibrium and in kinetic aspects. Equations (9) and (14) are still valid, but equilibria and kinetics of chemical reactions must take into account the energetic, structural, and dynamic properties of the environment as well. 

The model of a reacting molecular crystal proposed by Luty and Eckhardt [315] is centered on the description of the collective response of the crystal to a local strain expressed by means of an elastic stress tensor. The local strain of mechanical origin is, for our purposes, produced by the pressure or by the chemical transformation of a molecule at site n. The mechanical perturbation field couples to the internal and external (translational and rotational) coordinates Q n) generating a non local response. The dynamical variable Q can include any set of coordinates of interest for the process under consideration. In the model the system Hamiltonian includes a single molecule term, the coupling between the molecular variables at different sites through a force constants matrix W, and a third term that takes into account the coupling to the dynamical variables of the operator of the local stress. In the linear approximation, the response of the system is expressed by a response function X to a local field that can be approximated by a mean field V ... 

Molecular motion in solids has been the object of many studies in the field of physical chemistry of polymers , but dynamic processes in molecular crystals of organic and inorganic compounds are less well investigated. In fact, the average chemist is not aware of the fact that processes like internal rotation or ring inversion proceed in solids quite often with barriers which are not very different from those found for these types of internal motion in the liquid state. Thus, for the equatorial axial ring inversion of fluorocyclohexane values of 42.4 and 43.9 kJ mol have been measured in the liquid and the solid, respectively. The familiar thermal ellipsoids of individual atoms obtained from X-ray studies are qualitative indicators of molecular motion in the crystal, but a more quantitative study of such processes is only possible after appropriate solid state NMR techniques are applied. 

For a molecular crystal, the internal modes tend to be q independent and thus appear as horizontal lines in Fig. 2.1 n is then equal to the number of molecules M in the cell, leading to a considerable simplification. The resulting dynamical matrix has 6M x 6M elements, considering both translational and rotational motions, and atom-atom potential functions may be used for its evaluation. Dispersion curves obtained in this manner for anthracene and naphthalene, are illustrated in Fig. 2.2. 

Several issues remain to be addressed. The effect of the mutual penetration of the electron distributions should be analyzed, while the use of theoretical densities on isolated molecules does not take into account the induced polarization of the molecular charge distribution in a crystal. In the calculations by Coombes et al. (1996), the effect of electron correlation on the isolated molecule density is approximately accounted for by a scaling of the electrostatic contributions by a factor of 0.9. Some of these effects are in opposite directions and may roughly cancel. As pointed out by Price and coworkers, lattice energy calculations based on the average static structure ignore the dynamical aspects of the molecular crystal. However, the necessity to include electrostatic interactions in lattice energy calculations of molecular crystals is evident and has been established unequivocally. 

As has become clear in previous sections, atomic thermal parameters refined from X-ray or neutron diffraction data contain information on the thermodynamics of a crystal, because they depend on the atom dynamics. However, as diffracted intensities (in kinematic approximation) provide magnitudes of structure factors, but not their phases, so atomic displacement parameters provide the mean amplitudes of atomic motion but not the phase of atomic displacement (i.e., the relative motion of atoms). This means that vibrational frequencies are not directly available from a model where Uij parameters are refined. However, Biirgi demonstrated [111] that such information is in fact available from sets of (7,yS refined on the same molecular crystals at different temperatures. 

An interesting aspect of many structural phase transitions is the coupling of the primary order parameter to a secondary order parameter. In transitions of molecular crystals, the order parameter is coupled with reorientational or libration modes. In Jahn-Teller as well as ferroelastic transitions, an optical phonon or an electronic excitation is coupled with strain (acoustic phonon). In antiferrodistortive transitions, a zone-boundary phonon (primary order parameter) can induce spontaneous polarization (secondary order parameter). Magnetic resonance and vibrational spectroscopic methods provide valuable information on static as well as dynamic processes occurring during a transition (Owens et ai, 1979 Iqbal Owens, 1984 Rao, 1993). Complementary information is provided by diffraction methods. 

Vol. 26 S. Califano, V. Schettino and N. Neto, Lattice Dynamics of Molecular Crystals. VI, 309 pages. 1981. 

The issues relevant in the construction of anion hosts cannot be grouped in a hierarchical order as there is an intimate interplay between all of them. Successful design mandates a balanced compromise in weighting the individual influences. Advice can and should be sought from pertinent calculations (molecular modelling/dynamics), from the successes and the very few examples of failure accumulated in the literature and collected in recent reviews [21-24], from inspiration provided by abundant biological examples and crystal structures, and not least from personal experience in the handling... 

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