Calculating intensities using effective Hamiltonians in terms of Coriolis-adapted normal modes

The calculation of rovibrational transition energies and intensities is often hampered by the fact that vibrational states are strongly coupled by Coriolis terms. Because it invalidates the use of perturbation theory for the purpose of decoupling these states, the coupling makes it difficult to analyze spectra and to extract information from them. One either ignores the problem and hopes that the effect of the coupling is minimal or one is forced to diagonalize effective rovibrational matrices (rather than diagonalizing effective rotational matrices). In this paper we apply a procedure, based on a quantum mechanical canonical transformation for deriving decoupled effective rotational Hamiltonians. In previous papers we have used this technique to compute energy levels. In this paper we show that it can also be applied to determine intensities. The ideas are applied to the ethylene molecule.     

How to choose one-dimensional basis functions so that a very efficient multidimensional basis may be extracted from a direct product of the one-dimensional functions: energy levels of coupled systems with as many as 16 coordinates

In this paper we propose a scheme for choosing basis functions for quantum dynamics calculations. Direct product bases are frequently used. The number of direct product functions required to converge a spectrum, compute a rate constant, etc., is so large that direct product calculations are impossible for molecules or reacting systems with more than four atoms. It is common to extract a smaller working basis from a huge direct product basis by removing some of the product functions. We advocate a build and prune strategy of this type. The one-dimensional (1D) functions from which we build the direct product basis are chosen to satisfy two conditions: (1) they nearly diagonalize the full Hamiltonian matrix; (2) they minimize off-diagonal matrix elements that couple basis functions with diagonal elements close to those of the energy levels we wish to compute. By imposing these conditions we increase the number of product functions that can be removed from the multidimensional basis without degrading the accuracy of computed energy levels. Two basic types of 1D basis functions are in common use: eigenfunctions of 1D Hamiltonians and discrete variable representation (DVR) functions. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The 1D functions we propose are intermediate between the 1D eigenfunction functions and the DVR functions. If the coupling is very weak, they are very nearly 1D eigenfunction functions. As the strength of the coupling is increased they resemble more closely DVR functions. We assess the usefulness of our basis by applying it to model 6D, 8D, and 16D Hamiltonians with various coupling strengths. We find approximately linear scaling.     

Contracted basis Lanczos methods for computing numerically exact rovibrational levels of methane

We present a numerically exact calculation of rovibrational levels of a five-atom molecule. Two contracted basis Lanczos strategies are proposed. The first and preferred strategy is a two-stage contraction. Products of eigenfunctions of a four-dimensional (4D) stretch problem and eigenfunctions of 5D bend-rotation problems, one for each K, are used as basis functions for computing eigenfunctions and eigenvalues (for each K) of the Hamiltonian without the Coriolis coupling term, denoted H0. Finally, energy levels of the full Hamiltonian are calculated in a basis of the eigenfunctions of H0. The second strategy is a one-stage contraction in which energy levels of the full Hamiltonian are computed in the product contracted basis (without first computing eigenfunctions of H0). The two-stage contraction strategy, albeit more complicated, has the crucial advantage that it is trivial to parallelize the calculation so that the CPU and memory costs are independent of J. For the one-stage contraction strategy the CPU and memory costs of the difficult part of the calculation scale linearly with J. We use the polar coordinates associated with orthogonal Radau vectors and spherical harmonic type rovibrational basis functions. A parity-adapted rovibrational basis suitable for a five-atom molecule is proposed and employed to obtain bend-rotation eigenfunctions in the first step of both contraction methods. The effectiveness of the two methods is demonstrated by calculating a large number of converged J = 1 rovibrational levels of methane using a global potential energy surface.