Nuclear anharmonicity

With the availability of lasers, Brillouin scattering can now be used more confidently to study electron-phonon interactions and to probe the energy, damping and relative weight of the various hydro-dynamic collective modes in anharmonic insulating crystals.The connection between the intensity and spectral distribution of scattered light and the nuclear displacement-displacement correlation function has been extensively discussed by Griffin 236). 

To obtain the anharmonic terms in the potential, on the other hand, the choice of coordinates is important 130,131). The reason is that the anharmonic terms can only be obtained from a perturbation expansion on the harmonic results, and the convergence of this expansion differs considerably from one set of coordinates to another. In addition it is usually necessary to assume that some of the anharmonic interaction terms are zero and this is true only for certain classes of internal coordinates. For example, one can define an angle bend in HjO either by a rectilinear displacement of the hydrogen atoms or by a curvilinear displacement. At the harmonic level there is no difference between the two, but one can see that a rectilinear displacement introduces some stretching of the OH bonds whereas the curvilinear displacement does not. The curvilinear coordinate follows more closely the bottom of the potential well (Fig. 12) than the linear displacement and this manifests itself in rather small cubic stretch-bend interaction constants whereas these constants are larger for rectilinear coordinates. A final and important point about the choice of curvilinear coordinates is that they are geometrically defined (i.e. independent of nuclear masses) so that the resulting force constants do not depend on isotopic species. At the anharmonic level this is not true for rectilinear coordinates as it has been shown that the imposition of the Eckart conditions, that the internal coordinates shall introduce no overall translation or rotation of the body, forces them to have a small isotopic dependence 132). 

It should be noted that (4.28) is only an approximation for the nuclear wave function. The perturbation terms (4.36) will mix into the nuclear wave function small contributions from harmonic-oscillator functions with quantum numbers other than v. These anharmonicity corrections to the vibrational wave function will add further to the probability of transitions with At) > 1. 

The relevant question regarding secondary IEs on acidity is the extent to which IEs affect the electronic distribution. How can an inductive effect be reconciled with the Born-Oppenheimer approximation Although the potential-energy function and the electronic wave function are independent of nuclear mass, an anharmonic potential leads to different vibrational wave functions for different masses. Averaging over the ground-state wave function leads to different positions for the nuclei and thus averaged electron densities that vary with isotope. This certainly leads to NMR isotope shifts (IEs on chemical shifts), because nuclear shielding is sensitive to electron density.16... 

In our discussion the usual Born-Oppenheimer (BO) approximation will be employed. This means that we assume a standard partition of the effective Hamiltonian into an electronic and a nuclear part, as well as the factorization of the solute wavefunction into an electronic and a nuclear component. As will be clear soon, the corresponding electronic problem is the main source of specificities of QM continuum models, due to the nonlinearity of the effective electronic Hamiltonian of the solute. The QM nuclear problem, whose solution gives information on solvent effects on the nuclear structure (geometry) and properties, has less specific aspects, with respect the case of the isolated molecules. In fact, once the proper potential energy surfaces are obtained from the solution of the electronic problem, such a problem can be solved using the standard methods and approximations (mechanical harmonicity, and anharmonicity of various order) used for isolated molecules. The QM nuclear problem is mainly connected with the vibrational properties of the nuclei and the corresponding spectroscopic observables, and it will be considered in more detail in the contributions in the book dedicated to the vibrational spectroscopies (IR/Raman). This contribution will be focused on the QM electronic problem. 

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