The dipolar endofullerene HF@C60

The cavity inside fullerenes provides a unique environment for the study of isolated atoms and molecules. We report encapsulation of hydrogen fluoride inside C60 using molecular surgery to give the endohedral fullerene HF@C60. The key synthetic step is the closure of the open fullerene cage while minimizing escape of HF. The encapsulated HF molecule moves freely inside the cage and exhibits quantization of its translational and rotational degrees of freedom, as revealed by inelastic neutron scattering and infrared spectroscopy. The rotational and vibrational constants of the encapsulated HF molecules were found to be redshifted relative to free HF. The NMR spectra display a large 1H-19F J coupling typical of an isolated species. The dipole moment of HF@C60 was estimated from the temperature-dependence of the dielectric constant at cryogenic temperatures and showed that the cage shields around 75% of the HF dipole

Time-Dependent Density Functional Tight Binding: New Formulation and Benchmark of Excited States

A new formulation of time-dependent density functional tight binding (TD-DFTB) is reported in this paper. It is derived from the application of the linear response theory to the ground state DFTB Hamiltonian, without the introduction of additional parameters for the description of the excited states. The method is validated for several sets of organic compounds, against the best theoretical estimates from the literature, density functional theory, semiempirical methods, and experimental data. The comparison shows that TD-DFTB gives reliable results both for singlet and triplet excitation energies. In addition, the application of TD-DFTB to open-shell systems shows promising results