Unraveling substituent effects on frontier orbitals of conjugated molecules using an absolutely localized molecular orbital based analysis.

It is common to introduce electron-donating or electron-withdrawing substituent groups into functional conjugated molecules (such as dyes) to tune their electronic structure properties (such as frontier orbital energy levels) and photophysical properties (such as absorption and emission wavelengths). However, there lacks a generally applicable tool that can unravel the underlying interactions between orbitals from a substrate molecule and those from its substituents in modern electronic structure calculations, despite the long history of qualitative molecular orbital theory. In this work, the absolutely localized molecular orbitals (ALMO) based analysis is extended to analyze the effects of substituent groups on the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) of a given system. This provides a bottom-up avenue towards quantification of effects from distinct physical origins (e.g. permanent electrostatics/Pauli repulsion, mutual polarization, inter-fragment orbital mixing). For the example case of prodan (a typical dye molecule), it is found that inter-fragment orbital mixing plays a key role in narrowing the HOMO-LUMO gap of the naphthalene core. Specifically, an out-of-phase mixing of high-lying occupied orbitals on the naphthalene core and the dimethylamino group leads to an elevated HOMO, whereas an in-phase combination of LUMOs on the naphthalene core and the propionyl group lowers the LUMO energy of the entire molecule. We expect this ALMO-based analysis to bridge the gap between concepts from qualitative orbital interaction analysis and quantitative electronic structure calculations

Environmentally driven symmetry-breaking quenches dual fluorescence in proflavine

Nonadiabatic couplings between several electronic excited states are ubiquitous in many organic chromophores and can significantly influence optical properties. A recent experimental study demonstrated that the proflavine molecule exhibits surprising dual fluorescence in the gas phase, that is suppressed in polar solvent environments. Here, we uncover the origin of this phenomenon by parameterizing a linear-vibronic coupling (LVC) Hamiltonian from spectral densities of system-bath coupling constructed along molecular dynamics trajectories, fully accounting for interactions with the condensed-phase environment. The finite-temperature absorption, steady-stat emission, and time-resolved emission spectra are then computed using powerful, numerically exact tensor network approaches. We find that the dual fluorescence in vacuum is driven by a single well-defined coupling mode, but is quenched in solution due to dynamic solvent-driven symmetry-breaking that mixes the two low-lying electronic states. We expect the computational framework developed here to be widely applicable to the study of non-Condon effects in complex condensed-phase environments.Comment: Supplementary material included. Data available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10699238. Additional code available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1071200

Relativistic Orbital Optimized Density Functional Theory for Accurate Core-Level Spectroscopy

Core-level spectra of 1s electrons (K-edge) of elements heavier than Ne show significant relativistic effects. We combine recent advances in orbital optimized density functional theory (OO-DFT) with the spin-free exact two-component (X2C) model for scalar relativistic effects, to study K-edge spectra of elements in the third period of the periodic table. OO-DFT/X2C is found to be quite accurate at predicting energies, yielding $\sim 0.5$ eV root mean square error (RMSE) vs experiment with the local SCAN functional and the related SCANh hybrid functional. This marks a signficant improvement over the $>50$ eV deviations that are typical for the popular time-dependent DFT (TDDFT) approach. Consequently, experimental spectra are quite well reproduced by OO-DFT/X2C, without any need for empirical shifts for alignment between the two. OO-DFT/X2C therefore is a promising route for computing core-level spectra of third period elements, as it combines high accuracy with ground state DFT cost. We also explored K and L edges of 3d transition metals to identify possible limitations of the OO-DFT/X2C approach and discuss what additional features would be needed for accurately modeling the spectra of such electrons

A Non-Perturbative Pairwise-Additive Analysis of Charge Transfer Contributions to Intermolecular Interaction Energies

Energy decomposition analysis (EDA) based on absolutely localized molecular orbitals (ALMOs) decomposes the interaction energy between molecules into physically interpretable components like geometry distortion, frozen interactions, polarization, and charge transfer (CT, also sometimes called charge delocalization) interactions. In this work, a numerically exact scheme to decompose the CT interaction energy into pairwise additive terms is introduced for the ALMO-EDA using density functional theory. Unlike perturbative pairwise charge-decomposition analysis, the new approach does not break down for strongly interacting systems, or show significant exchange-correlation functional dependence in the decomposed energy components. Both the energy lowering and the charge flow associated with CT can be decomposed. Complementary occupied-virtual orbital pairs (COVPs) that capture the dominant donor and acceptor CT orbitals are obtained for the new decomposition. It is applied to systems with different types of interactions including DNA base-pairs, borane-ammonia adducts, and transition metal hexacarbonyls. While consistent with most existing understanding of the nature of CT in these systems, the results also reveal some new insights into the origin of trends in donor-acceptor interactions

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry: An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design

Approaching the basis set limit for DFT calculations using an environment-adapted minimal basis with perturbation theory: formulation, proof of concept, and a pilot implementation

Recently developed density functionals have good accuracy for both thermochemistry (TC) and non-covalent interactions (NC) if very large atomic orbital basis sets are used. To approach the basis set limit with potentially lower computational cost, a new self-consistent field (SCF) scheme is presented that employs minimal adaptive basis (MAB) functions. The MAB functions are optimized on each atomic site by minimizing a surrogate function. High accuracy is obtained by applying a perturbative correction (PC) to the MAB calculation, similar to dual basis approaches. Compared to exact SCF results, using this MAB-SCF?(PC) approach with the same large target basis set produces <0.15 kcal/mol root-mean-square deviations for most of the tested TC datasets, and <0.1 kcal/mol for most of the NC datasets. The performance of density functionals near the basis set limit can be even better reproduced. With further improvement to its implementation, MAB-SCF?(PC) is a promising lower-cost substitute for conventional large-basis calculations as a method to approach the basis set limit of modern density functionals

SPICE, A Dataset of Drug-like Molecules and Peptides for Training Machine Learning Potentials

Machine learning potentials are an important tool for molecular simulation, but their development is held back by a shortage of high quality datasets to train them on. We describe the SPICE dataset, a new quantum chemistry dataset for training potentials relevant to simulating drug-like small molecules interacting with proteins. It contains over 1.1 million conformations for a diverse set of small molecules, dimers, dipeptides, and solvated amino acids. It includes 15 elements, charged and uncharged molecules, and a wide range of covalent and non-covalent interactions. It provides both forces and energies calculated at the {\omega}B97M-D3(BJ)/def2-TZVPPD level of theory, along with other useful quantities such as multipole moments and bond orders. We train a set of machine learning potentials on it and demonstrate that they can achieve chemical accuracy across a broad region of chemical space. It can serve as a valuable resource for the creation of transferable, ready to use potential functions for use in molecular simulations.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry:An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design