Molecular properties nonlinear response

In order to describe the second-order nonlinear response from the interface of two centrosynnnetric media, the material system may be divided into tlnee regions the interface and the two bulk media. The interface is defined to be the transitional zone where the material properties—such as the electronic structure or molecular orientation of adsorbates—or the electromagnetic fields differ appreciably from the two bulk media. For most systems, this region occurs over a length scale of only a few Angstroms. With respect to the optical radiation, we can thus treat the nonlinearity of the interface as localized to a sheet of polarization. Fonnally, we can describe this sheet by a nonlinear dipole moment per unit area, -P ", which is related to a second-order bulk polarization by hy P - lx, y,r) = y. Flere z is the surface nonnal direction, and the... 

We observe that these contributions to the response equations have the same structure as the response equations for the molecule in vacuum [83]. We note that the implementation of these modifications to the vacuum MCSCF response equations gives us the possibility of investigating linear and nonlinear molecular properties of molecular systems interacting with heterogeneous dielectric media. 

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in nonlinear phenomena, both from a fundamental point of view, and for the development of new nonlinear optical and optoelectronic devices. Even in the optical case, the nonlinearity is usually engendered by a solid or molecular medium whose properties are typically determined by nonlinear response of an interacting many-electron system. To be able to predict these response properties we need an efficient description of exchange and correlation phenomena in many-electron systems which are not necessarily near to equilibrium. The objective of this chapter is to develop the basic formalism of time-dependent nonlinear response within density functional theory, i.e., the calculation of the higher-order terms of the functional Taylor expansion Eq. (143). In the following this will be done explicitly for the second- and third-order terms... 

Molecular electric properties give the response of a molecule to the presence of an applied field E. Dynamic properties are defined for time-oscillating fields, whereas static properties are obtained if the electric field is time-independent. The electronic contribution to the response properties can be calculated using finite field calculations , which are based upon the expansion of the energy in a Taylor series in powers of the field strength. If the molecular properties are defined from Taylor series of the dipole moment /x, the linear response is given by the polarizability a, and the nonlinear terms of the series are given by the nth-order hyperpolarizabilities ()6 and y). 

Molecular polarizabilities and hyperpolarizabilities are now routinely calculated in many computational packages and reported in publications that are not primarily concerned with these properties. Very often the calculated values are not likely to be of quantitative accuracy when compared with experimental data. One difficulty is that, except in the case of very small molecules, gas phase data is unobtainable and some allowance has to be made for the effect of the molecular environment in a condensed phase. Another is that the accurate determination of the nonlinear response functions requires that electron correlation should be treated accurately and this is not easy to achieve for the molecules that are of greatest interest. Very often the higher-level calculation is confined to zero frequency and the results scaled by using a less complete theory for the frequency dependence. Typically, ab initio studies use coupled-cluster methods for the static values scaled to frequencies where the effects are observable with time-dependent Hartree-Fock theory. Density functional methods require the introduction of specialized functions before they can cope with the hyperpolarizabilities and higher order magnetic effects. 

The oriented gas model was first employed by Chemla et al. [4] to extract molecular second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) properties from crystal data and was based on earlier work by Bloembergen [5]. In this model, molecular hyperpolarizabilities are assumed to be additive and the macroscopic crystal susceptibilities are obtained by performing a tensor sum of the microscopic hyperpolarizabilities of the molecules that constitute the unit cell. The effects of the surroundings are approximated by using simple local field factors. The second-order nonlinear response, for example, is given by... 

In a subsequent paper, Munn [98] showed that the frequency-dependent local-field tensors accounted for the shift of the poles of the linear and nonlinear susceptibilities from the isolated molecular excitation frequencies to the exciton frequencies. The treatment also described the Davydov splitting of the exciton frequencies for situations where there is more than one molecule per unit cell as weU as the band character or wave-vector dependence of these collective excitations. In particular, the direct and cascading contributions to x contained terms with poles at the molecular excitation energies, but they canceled exactly. Combining both terms is therefore a prerequisite to obtaining the correct pole structure of the macroscopic third-order susceptibility. Munn also demonstrated that this local field approach can be combined with the properties of the effective or dressed molecule and can be extended to electric quadrupole and magnetic dipole nonlinear responses [96]. 

Among several different approaches to the problem of the evaluation of the nonlinear response of molecular systems, one can distinguish finite field (FF) approaches [28, 47], response theory [89, 90], and sum-over-states (SOS) methods [91, 113], Those three approaches are available in many flavours. In this chapter we shall describe the last approach to the computation of resonant and non-resonant electronic nonlinear optical properties of molecules. 

The understanding and reliable prediction of the influence of the solute-solvent interactions on the nonlinear optical properties of molecular systems is a significant issue for a width range of theoretical and experimental areas of studies. In this review, it was shown that the simple two-state approximations combined with tlie solvatochromic methods are an effective tools in prediction tlie direction of tlie changes of molecular nonlinear responses as a function of solvent polarity. This methodology based on the description of the solvent effects at the molecular level should be treated as a supporting for the most sophisticated quantum chemical approaches. 

---