System single solvation state

In this chapter, the recent progress in the understanding of the nature and dynamics of excess (solvated) electrons in molecular fluids composed of polar molecules with no electron affinity (EA), such as liquid water (hydrated electron, and aliphatic alcohols, is examined. Our group has recently reviewed the literature on solvated electron in liquefied ammonia and saturated hydrocarbons and we refer the reader to these publications for an introduction to the excess electron states in such liquids. We narrowed this review to bulk neat liquids and (to a much lesser degree) large water anion clusters in the gas phase that serve as useful reference systems for solvated electrons in the bulk. The excess electrons trapped by supramolecular structures (including single macrocycle molecules ), such as clusters of polar molecules and water pools of reverse micelles in nonpolar liquids and complexes of the electrons with cations in concentrated salt solutions, are examined elsewhere. 

We consider the reactive solute system with coordinate x and its associated mass p, in the neighborhood of the barrier top, located at x=xi=0, and in the presence of the solvent. We characterize the latter by the single coordinate. v, with an associated mass ps. If the solvent were equilibrated to x in the barrier passage, so that there is equilibrium solvation and s = seq(x), the potential for x is just -1/2 pcc X2, where (, , is the equilibrium barrier frequency [cf. (2.2)]. To this potential we add a locally harmonic restoring potential for the solvent coordinate to account for deviations from this equilibrium state of affairs ... 

A different analysis applies to the LR approach (in either Tamm-Dancoff, Random Phase Approximation, or Time-dependent DFT version) where the excitation energies are directly determined as singularities of the frequency-dependent linear response functions of the solvated molecule in the ground state, and thus avoiding explicit calculation of the excited state wave function. In this case, the iterative scheme of the SS approaches is no longer necessary, and the whole spectrum of excitation energies can be obtained in a single run as for isolated systems. 

We have also applied this theory to biologically relevant systems, such as PCET in DNA-acrylamide complexes [61]. Experiments implied that PCET may occur in such complexes [62]. The influence of neighboring DNA base pairs was determined theoretically by studying both solvated thymine-acrylamide and solvated DNA-acrylamide models. The calculations indicated that the final product corresponds to single ET for the solvated thymine-acrylamide complex but to a net PCET reaction for the solvated DNA-acrylamide models. This difference is due to a decrease in solvent accessibility in the presence of DNA, which alters the relative free energies of the ET and PCET product states. Thus, the balance between ET and PCET in the DNA-acrylamide system is highly sensitive to the solvation properties of the system. 

---