Magnitudes, vibration-rotation Hamiltonians

The perturbation calculation may also be described as a contact transformation. The original hamiltonian is transformed to a new effective hamiltonian which has the same eigenvalues but different eigenfunctions, to some carefully chosen order of magnitude. This contact transformation of the vibration-rotation hamiltonian was originally studied by Nielsen and co-workers. >33... 

The vibration—rotation Hamiltonian is valid irrespective of the magnitude of the amplitudes of vibrations, Le. it could be used in principle to non-rigid molecules as well. There are, however, two main sources of difficulty which arise if we wish to apply to non-rigid molecules. 

First, as the molecule on which the chromophore sits rotates, this projection will change. Second, the magnitude of the transition dipole may depend on bath coordinates, which in analogy with gas-phase spectroscopy is called a non-Condon effect For water, as we will see, this latter dependence is very important [13, 14]. In principle there are off-diagonal terms in the Hamiltonian in this truncated two-state Hilbert space, which depend on the bath coordinates and which lead to vibrational energy relaxation [4]. In practice it is usually too difficult to treat both the spectral diffusion and vibrational relaxation problems at the same time, and so one usually adds the effects of this relaxation phenomenologically, and the lifetime 7j can either be calculated separately or determined from experiment. Within this approach the line shape can be written as [92 94]... 

Chapters 2, 3, and 5 form the core of this book. Perturbations are defined and simple procedures for evaluating matrix elements of angular momentum operators are presented in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 deals with the troublesome terms in the molecular Hamiltonian that are responsible for perturbations. Particular attention is devoted to the reduction of matrix elements to separately evaluable rotational, vibrational, and electronic factors. Whenever possible the electronic factor is reduced to one- and two-electron orbital matrix elements. The magnitudes and physical interpretations of matrix elements are discussed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 4 the process of reducing spectra to molecular constants and the difficulty of relating empirical-parameters to terms in the exact molecular Hamiltonian are described. Transition intensities, especially quantum mechanical interference effects, are discussed in Chapter 6. Also included in Chapter 6 are examples of experiments that illustrate, sample, or utilize perturbation effects. The phenomena of predissociation and autoionization are forms of perturbation and are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. 

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