Vibrationally induced electronic currents

Nafie LA (1983) Adiabatic molecular-properties beyond the Bom-Oppenheimer approximation - complete adiabatic wave-functions and vibrationally induced electronic current-density. J Chem Phys 79 4950-4957... 

Nafie, L.A. (1983) Adiabatic behavior beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Complete adiabatic wavefunctions and vibrationally induced electronic current density. J. Chem. Phys., 79, 4950-4957. 

The second major mechanism of VCD is the production of vibrationally generated electronic current density by the vibrational motion of a local oscillator. Usually, such currents are induced in molecular rings, or fragments of rings, and the local oscillator may either be attached to the ring or contained in it. The resulting VCD per oscillator is biased and monosignate. 

Figure 3.44. Dissociation of 02 adsorbed on Pt(lll) by inelastic tunneling of electrons from a STM tip. (a) Schematic ID PES for chemisorbed Of dissociation and illustrating different types of excitations that can lead to dissociation, (b) Schematic picture of inelastic electron tunneling to an adsorbate-induced resonance with density of states pa inducing vibrational excitation (1) competing with non-adiabatic vibrational de-excitation that creates e-h pairs in the substrate (2). (c) Dissociation rate Rd for 0 as a function of tunneling current I at the three tip bias voltages labeled in the figure. Solid lines are fits of Rd a IN to the experiments with N = 0.8, 1.8, and 3.2 for tip biases of 0.4, 0.3, and 0.2 V, respectively and correspond to the three excitation conditions in (a). Dashed lines are results of a theoretical model incorporating the physics in (a) and (b) and a single fit parameter. From Ref. [153].

The theoretical model developed to explain these experiments is based on inelastic tunneling of electrons from the tip into the 2ir adsorbate resonance that induces vibrational excitation in a manner similar to that of the DIMET model (Figure 3.44(b)). Of course, in this case, the chemistry is induced by specific and variable energy hot electrons rather than a thermal distribution at Te. Another significant difference is that STM induced currents are low so that vibrational excitation rates are smaller than vibrational de-excitation rates via e-h pair damping. Therefore, coherent vibrational ladder climbing dominates over incoherent ladder climbing,... 

When a tunneling calculation is undertaken, many simplifications render the task easier than a complete transport calculation such as the one of [32]. Let us take the formulation by Caroli et al. [16] using the change induced by the vibration in the spectral function of the lead. In this description, the current and thus the conductance are proportional to the density of states (spectral function) of the leads (here tip and substrate). This is tantamount to using some perturbational scheme on the electron transmission amplitude between tip and substrate. This is what Bardeen s transfer Hamiltonian achieves. The main advantage of this approximation is that one can use the electronic structure calculated by some standard way, for example plane-wave codes, and use perturbation theory to account for the inelastic effect. In [33], a careful description of the Bardeen approximation in the context of inelastic tunneling is given, and how the equivalent of Tersoff and Hamann theory [34,35] of the STM is obtained in the inelastic case. 

Apart from purely electronic effects, an asymmetric nuclear relaxation in the electric field can also contribute to the first hyperpolarizability in processes that are partly induced by a static field, such as the Pockels effect [55, 56], and much attention is currently devoted to the study of the vibrational hyperpolarizability, can be deduced from experimental data in two different ways [57, 58], and a review of the theoretical calculations of p, is given in Refs. [59] and [60]. The numerical value of the static P is often similar to that of static electronic hyperpolarizabilities, and this was rationalized with a two-state valence-bond charge transfer model. Recent ab-initio computational tests have shown, however, that this model is not always adequate and that a direct correlation between static electronic and vibrational hyperpolarizabilities does not exist [61]. 

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