804 research outputs found
Electronic Excitations in Complex Molecular Environments: Many-Body Green's Functions Theory in VOTCA-XTP
Many-body Green's functions theory within the GW approximation and the
Bethe-Salpeter Equation (BSE) is implemented in the open-source VOTCA-XTP
software, aiming at the calculation of electronically excited states in complex
molecular environments. Based on Gaussian-type atomic orbitals and making use
of resolution of identify techniques, the code is designed specifically for
non-periodic systems. Application to the small molecule reference set
successfully validates the methodology and its implementation for a variety of
excitation types covering an energy range from 2-8 eV in single molecules.
Further, embedding each GW-BSE calculation into an atomistically resolved
surrounding, typically obtained from Molecular Dynamics, accounts for effects
originating from local fields and polarization. Using aqueous DNA as a
prototypical system, different levels of electrostatic coupling between the
regions in this GW-BSE/MM setup are demonstrated. Particular attention is paid
to charge-transfer (CT) excitations in adenine base pairs. It is found that
their energy is extremely sensitive to the specific environment and to
polarization effects. The calculated redshift of the CT excitation energy
compared to a nucelobase dimer treated in vacuum is of the order of 1 eV, which
matches expectations from experimental data. Predicted lowest CT energies are
below that of a single nucleobase excitation, indicating the possibility of an
initial (fast) decay of such an UV excited state into a bi-nucleobase CT
exciton. The results show that VOTCA-XTP's GW-BSE/MM is a powerful tool to
study a wide range of types of electronic excitations in complex molecular
environments
Bethe-Salpeter Equation Calculations of Core Excitation Spectra
We present a hybrid approach for GW/Bethe-Salpeter Equation (BSE)
calculations of core excitation spectra, including x-ray absorption (XAS),
electron energy loss spectra (EELS), and non-resonant inelastic x-ray
scattering (NRIXS). The method is based on {\it ab initio} wavefunctions from
the plane-wave pseudopotential code ABINIT; atomic core-level states and
projector augmented wave (PAW) transition matrix elements; the NIST core-level
BSE solver; and a many-pole GW self-energy model to account for final-state
broadening and self-energy shifts. Multiplet effects are also accounted for.
The approach is implemented using an interface dubbed OCEAN (Obtaining Core
Excitations using ABINIT and NBSE). To demonstrate the utility of the code we
present results for the K-edges in LiF as probed by XAS and NRIXS, the K-edges
of KCl as probed by XAS, the Ti L_2,3-edge in SrTiO_3 as probed by XAS, and the
Mg L_2,3-edge in MgO as probed by XAS. We compare the results to experiments
and results obtained using other theoretical approaches
Spectroscopic Signature of Oxidized Oxygen States in Peroxides
Recent debates on the oxygen redox behaviors in battery electrodes have
triggered a pressing demand for the reliable detection and understanding of
non-divalent oxygen states beyond conventional absorption spectroscopy. Here,
enabled by high-efficiency mapping of resonant inelastic X-ray scattering
(mRIXS) coupled with first-principles calculations, we report distinct mRIXS
features of the oxygen states in Li2O, Li2CO3, and especially, Li2O2, which are
successfully reproduced and interpreted theoretically. mRIXS signals are
dominated by valence-band decays in Li2O and Li2CO3. However, the oxidized
oxygen in Li2O2 leads to partially unoccupied O-2p states that yield a specific
intra-band excitonic feature in mRIXS. Such a feature displays a specific
emission energy in mRIXS, which disentangles the oxidized oxygen states from
the dominating transition-metal/oxygen hybridization features in absorption
spectroscopy, thus providing critical hints for both detecting and
understanding the oxygen redox reactions in transition-metal oxide based
battery materials.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, plus 11 pages of Supplementary Information with
4 figure
Tensor Numerical Methods in Quantum Chemistry: from Hartree-Fock Energy to Excited States
We resume the recent successes of the grid-based tensor numerical methods and
discuss their prospects in real-space electronic structure calculations. These
methods, based on the low-rank representation of the multidimensional functions
and integral operators, led to entirely grid-based tensor-structured 3D
Hartree-Fock eigenvalue solver. It benefits from tensor calculation of the core
Hamiltonian and two-electron integrals (TEI) in complexity using
the rank-structured approximation of basis functions, electron densities and
convolution integral operators all represented on 3D
Cartesian grids. The algorithm for calculating TEI tensor in a form of the
Cholesky decomposition is based on multiple factorizations using algebraic 1D
``density fitting`` scheme. The basis functions are not restricted to separable
Gaussians, since the analytical integration is substituted by high-precision
tensor-structured numerical quadratures. The tensor approaches to
post-Hartree-Fock calculations for the MP2 energy correction and for the
Bethe-Salpeter excited states, based on using low-rank factorizations and the
reduced basis method, were recently introduced. Another direction is related to
the recent attempts to develop a tensor-based Hartree-Fock numerical scheme for
finite lattice-structured systems, where one of the numerical challenges is the
summation of electrostatic potentials of a large number of nuclei. The 3D
grid-based tensor method for calculation of a potential sum on a lattice manifests the linear in computational work, ,
instead of the usual scaling by the Ewald-type approaches
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