Vibrational spectroscopy anharmonic couplings

The electronic absorption spectra of complex molecules at elevated temperatures in condensed matter are generally very broad and virtually featureless. In contrast, vibrational spectra of complex molecules, even in room-temperature liquids, can display sharp, well-defined peaks, many of which can be assigned to specific vibrational modes. The inverse of the line width sets a time scale for the dynamics associated with a transition. The relatively narrow line widths associated with many vibrational transitions make it possible to use pulse durations with correspondingly narrow bandwidths to extract information. For a vibration with sufficiently large anharmonicity or a sufficiently narrow absorption line, the system behaves as a two-level transition coupled to its environment. In this respect, time domain vibrational spectroscopy of internal molecular modes is more akin to NMR than to electronic spectroscopy. The potential has already been demonstrated, as described in some of the chapters in this book, to perform pulse sequences that are, in many respects, analogous to those used in NMR. Commercial equipment is available that can produce the necessary infrared (IR) pulses for such experiments, and the equipment is rapidly becoming less expensive, more compact, and more reliable. It is possible, even likely, that coherent IR pulse-sequence vibrational spectrometers will... 

The structure of this review is as follows. In Section 9.2, we briefly discuss methods for computing vibrational states of systems having several coupled vibrational degrees of freedom. This will also cover methods that were not yet adapted for direct use with ab initio potentials, since in our view, such extensions may be possible in the future, at least for some of the algorithms. The focus will be on methods that seem potentially applicable to large polyatomics, rather than those of great accuracy for small systems. Section 9.3 also deals with computational methods for anharmonic vibrational spectroscopy that are applicable to potential surfaces from electronic structure calculations. Our main focus will be on the Vibrational Self-Consistent Field (VSCF) approach in several variants and extensions. The performance of the available method in the present state of the art is discussed in Section 9.4. Future directions are outlined in Section 9.5. 

With regard to the electronic structure methodology, major obstacles must be surmounted before improvements can be made. Calculations with Coupled-Cluster methods, an obvious next step, are far more computationally costly than the presently used MP2, or B3LYP methods. In fact, there are extremely few direct ab initio calculations of anharmonic vibrational spectroscopy at higher than MP2 or DPT levels, even for small polyatomics. From the point of view of ab initio anharmonic spectroscopy, the leap from MP2 to the Coupled-Cluster method seems a bottleneck. One can draw encouragement from faster Coupled-Cluster implementations, so far employed with the perturbation theory anharmonic analysis [116,117]. 

In sharp contrast to conventional spectroscopic methods based on direct mie-photon absorption, IRMPD spectroscopy relies on the sequential absorption of a large number of IR photons. This excitation mechanism leaves an imprint on the observed IR spectrum in the sense that vibrational bands are typically broadened, red-shifted and affected in relative intensity to some extent. While the intramolecular processes underlying these spectral modifications have been addressed and qualitatively modelled in a large number of studies [166-172], it is often hard to predict quantitatively an IRMPD spectrum because the required molecular parameters, in particular the anharmonic couplings between vibrational normal modes at high internal energies, are usually unknown and cannot be calculated accurately using current quantum-chemical methods, fri practice, most experimental IRMPD spectra are therefore analysed oti the basis of computed linear absorption spectra, which usually provide a reasonable approximation to the IRMPD spectrum. 

Brauer B, Gerber RB, Kabelac M, Hobza P, Bakker JM, Riziq AGA, de Vries MS (2005) Vibrational spectroscopy of the G center dot center dot center dot C base pair experiment, harmonic and anharmonic calculations, and the nature of the anharmonic couplings. J Phys Chem A 109 6974-6984... 

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