Electronic optical response of molecules in intense fields: comparison of TD-HF, TD-CIS, and TD-CIS(D) approaches

Time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TD-HF) and time-dependent configuration interaction (TD-CI) methods with Gaussian basis sets have been compared in modeling the response of hydrogen molecule, butadiene, and hexatriene exposed to very short, intense laser pulses (760 nm, 3 cycles). After the electric field of the pulse returns to zero, the molecular dipole continues to oscillate due to the coherent superposition of excited states resulting from the nonadiabatic excitation caused by the pulse. The Fourier transform of this residual dipole gives a measure of the nonadiabatic excitation. For low fields, only the lowest excited states are populated, and TD-CI simulations using singly excited states with and without perturbative corrections for double excitations [TD-CIS(D) and TD-CIS, respectively] are generally in good agreement with the TD-HF simulations. At higher field strengths, higher states are populated and the methods begin to differ significantly if the coefficients of the excited states become larger than approximately 0.1. The response of individual excited states does not grow linearly with intensity because of excited state to excited state transitions. Beyond a threshold in the field strength, there is a rapid increase in the population of many higher excited states, possibly signaling an approach to ionization. However, without continuum functions, the present TD-HF and TD-CI calculations cannot model ionization directly. The TD-HF and TD-CIS simulations are in good accord because the excitation energies obtained by linear response TD-HF [also known as random phase approximation (RPA)] agree very well with those obtained from singly excited configuration interaction (CIS) calculations. Because CIS excitation energies with the perturbative doubles corrections [CIS(D)] are on average lower than the CIS excitation energies, the TD-CIS(D) response is generally stronger than TD-CIS.