Molecular electronic ground-state theories, whether ab initio, or semiempirical are most often formulated as a variational principle, where the electronic ground-state energy, considered a linear or nonlinear functional of a reduced density matrix, obtains a constrained minimum. In this communication, we present a Lagrangian analysis of the self-consistent-field electronic structure problem, which does not resort to the concept of orthogonal molecular orbitals. We also develop a method of constrained minimization efficiently applicable to nonlinear energy functional minimization, as well as to linear models such as tight-binding. The method is able to treat large molecules with an effort that scales linearly with the system size. It has built-in robustness and leads directly to the desired minimal solution. Performance is demonstrated on linear alkane and polyene chains.

An adiabatic-Floquet formalism is used to study the suppression of ionization in short laser pulses. In the high-frequency limit the adiabatic equations involve only the pulse envelope where transitions are purely ramp effects. For a short-ranged potential having a single-bound state we show that ionization suppression is caused by the appearance of a laser-induced resonance state, which is coupled by the pulse ramp to the ground state and acts to trap ionizing flux.

Shifted contour auxiliary field Monte Carlo is implemented for molecular electronic structure using a plane-waves basis and norm conserving pseudopotentials. The merits of the method are studied by computing atomization energies of H2,H2, BeH2,BeH2, and Be2.Be2. By comparing with high correlation methods, DFT-based norm conserving pseudopotentials are evaluated for performance in fully correlated molecular computations. Pseudopotentials based on generalized gradient approximation lead to consistently better atomization energies than those based on the local density approximation, and we find there is room for designing pseudopotentials better suited for full valence correlation.

Correlated sampling within the shifted contour auxiliary field Monte Carlo method, implemented using plane waves and pseudopotentials, allows computation of electronic forces on nuclei, potential energy differences, geometric and vibrotational spectroscopic constants. This is exemplified on the N2 molecule, where it is demonstrated that it is possible to accurately compute forces, dissociation energies, bond length parameters, and harmonic frequencies.

The shifted-contour auxiliary field Monte Carlo method applied within a plane waves and pseudopotential framework is shown capable of computing accurate molecular deformation barriers. The inversion barrier of water is used as a test case. A method of correlated sampling is extremely useful for deriving highly accurate barriers. The inversion barrier height is determined to be 1.37 eV with a statistical error bar of "0.01 eV. Recent high-level ab initio results are within the error bars. Several theoretical and methodological issues are discussed.

A numerical method is given for affecting nonlinear Schro¨dinger evolution on an initial wave function, applicable to a wide range of problems, such as time-dependent Hartree, Hartree-Fock, density-functional, and Gross-Pitaevskii theories. The method samples the evolving wave function at Chebyshev quadrature points of a given time interval. This achieves an optimal degree of representation. At these sampling points, an implicit equation, representing an integral Schro¨dinger equation, is given for the sampled wave function. Principles and application details are described, and several examples and demonstrations of the method and its numerical evaluation on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for a Bose-Einstein condensate are shown.

The diffusion constants of hydrogen and deuterium at low temperature were calculated using the surrogate Hamiltonian method and an embedded atom potential. A comparison with previous experimental and theoretical results is made. A crossover to temperature-independent tunneling occurs at 69 K for hydrogen and at 46 K for deuterium. An inverse isotope effect at intermediate temperatures is found, consistent with experiment. Deviations are found at low temperature where a large isotope effect is calculated.

A newly developed energy renormalization-group method for electronic structure of large systems with small Fermi gaps within a tight-binding framework is presented in detail. A telescopic series of nested Hilbert spaces is constructed, having exponentially decreasing dimensions and electrons, for which the Hamiltonian matrices have exponentially converging energy ranges focusing to the Fermi level and in which the contribution to the density matrix is a sparse contribution. The computational effort scales near linearly with system size even when the density matrix is highly nonlocal. This is illustrated by calculations on a model metal, a small radius carbon-nanotube and a two-dimensional puckered sheet polysilane semiconductor.

Recently the Jahn-Teller model was extended to treat (reactive) scattering processes. The present study is devoted to possible effects of a degenerate vibronic coupling (DVC) on resonances. The main conclusions are: (a) The DVC affects dramatically the state-to-state transition processes and as a result it shuffles resonances attached to given transitions and may cause existing resonances to be masked by other processes. (b) The DVC may affect the widths and the heights of resonances but change only slightly their position.

The representation of a quantum system by an evenly spaced Fourier grid is examined. This grid faithfully represents wave functions whose projection is contained in a rectangular phase space. This is mathematically equivalent to a band limited function with finite support. In general, have packets decay exponentially in classically forbidden regions of phase space. This idea is then used first to optimize the rectangular shape of the Fourier grid, leading to exponential convergence. Nevertheless, in most cases the representation is suboptimal. The representation efficiency can then be extremely enhanced by mapping the coordinates. The mapping procedure reshapes the wave function to fit into the rectangular Fourier shape such that the wasted phase space area is minimal. It is shown that canonical transformations, which rescale the coordinates, improve the representation dramatically. A specific scaling transformation enables the representation of the notoriously difficult Coulomb potentials. The scaling transformation enables one to extract almost as many converged eigenstate energies as there are grid points. The method is extendible to more than one dimension, which is demonstrated by the study of the H + 2 problem. This scaling transformation can bridge the gap between quantum chemistry and quantum molecular dynamics by enabling the treatment of electronic problems in the vicinity of Coulomb potentials by grid methods developed for molecular dynamics.

The dissociation dynamics of oxygen on silver surfaces is studied theoretically. The method is based on a quantum-mechanical time-dependent non-adiabatic picture. A universal functional form for the potential energy surfaces is employed. The diabatic potentials describing the sequence of events leading to dissociation begin from the physisorption potential crossing over to a charged molecular chemisorption potential and crossing over again to the dissociated atomic-surface potential. Within such a potential surface topology, two different surfaces leading to dissociation are studied: the empirical potential of Spruit and the ab-initio potential of Nakatsuji. It is found that the system is captured by the molecular chemisorption well for a considerable length of time, long enough for thermalization. Thus the calculation is split into two parts: the calculation of “direct” dissociation probability and the calculation of nonadiabatic dissociative tunneling rate from the thermalized chemisorbed molecular state. For the direct probabilities, the Fourier method with the Chebychev polynomial expansion of the evolution operator is used to solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. For the tunneling rate calculation, a similar expansion of Green's operator is used. The output of the direct-reaction calculation is the dissociation probability as a function of the initial energy content, while the tunneling calculation yields the dissociation rate. The dependence of the direct dissociation probability on the initial kinetic energy is found to be non-monotonic. A strong isotope effect has been found, favoring the dissociation of the light species.

The flux of an evolving wavepacket is the definite time integral of its probability current density. A new method for calculating the flux, based on a Chebychev polynomial expansion of the quantum evolution operator is presented. The central point of the development is that the time integration of the current density is performed analytically, resulting in a scheme which eliminates additional numerical errors. Using this method, one benefits from both the time-dependent and time-independent frameworks of the dynamics. Furthermore, the method requires only a small modification to the existing Chebychev polynomial evolution code. Examples of performance and accuracy and an application to the calculation of recombinative desorption probabilities of N2 on Re are shown and discussed.