Abstract
We report the first nonadiabatic molecular dynamics study based on the exact factorization of the electron-nuclear wave function. Our approach (a coupled-trajectory mixed quantum-classical, CT-MQC, scheme) is based on the quantum-classical limit derived from systematic and controlled approximations to the full quantum-mechanical problem formulated in the exact-factorization framework. Its strength is the ability to correctly capture quantum (de)coherence effects in a trajectory-based approach to excited-state dynamics. We show this by benchmarking CT-MQC dynamics against a revised version of the popular fewest-switches surface-hopping scheme that is able to fix its well-documented overcoherence issue. The CT-MQC approach is successfully applied to investigation of the photochemistry (ring-opening) of oxirane in the gas phase, analyzing in detail the role of decoherence. This work represents a significant step forward in the establishment of the exact factorization as a powerful tool to study excited-state dynamics, not only for interpretation purposes but mainly for nonadiabatic ab initio molecular dynamics simulations.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3048-3055 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 13 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 6 Jul 2017 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:S.K.M. acknowledges financial support from the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2016R1C1B2015103) and the 2015 Research Fund (1.150115.01) of UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology). I.T. acknowledges the Swiss National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) MARVEL for its support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Chemical Society.