ONIOM approach for non-adiabatic on-the-fly molecular dynamics demonstrated for the backbone controlled Dewar valence isomerization

J. Chem. Phys., 2012, 136, 204307 published on 25.05.2012
J. Chem. Phys.
Non-adiabatic on-the-fly molecular dynamics (NA-O-MD) simulations require the electronic wavefunction, energy gradients, and derivative coupling vectors in every timestep. Thus, they are commonly restricted to the excited state dynamics of molecules with up to ≈20 atoms. We discuss an approximation that combines the ONIOM(QM:QM) method with NA-O-MD simulations to allow calculations for larger molecules. As a proof of principle we present the excited state dynamics of a (6-4)-lesion containing dinucleotide (63 atoms), and especially the importance to include the confinement effects of the DNA backbone. The method is able to include electron correlation on a high level of theory and offers an attractive alternative to QM:MM approaches for moderate sized systems with unknown force fields.
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TU München