Coupled-monomers in molecular assemblies: theory and application to the water tetramer, pentamer, and ring hexamer

We present extensions to the local-monomer (LMon) Model, a general quantum method to describe coupled intramolecular vibrational modes of a molecular cluster consisting of a set of monomers [Y. Wang and J. M. Bowman, J. Chem. Phys. 134, 154510 (2011)], to incorporate monomer-monomer coupling. A central aspect of the LMon model is a local normal-mode analysis, done for each monomer, perturbed by all other mononers. Monomer-monomer coupling is described by several approaches based on these normal-mode analyses. Two are Hückel-type models, where coupling constants for each intramolecular mode are determined non-empirically from normal-mode analyses. One model, the simple one, is limited to nearest-neighbor interactions. The second and more general one determines monomer-monomer couplings from the full and local-monomer Hessians, with no further assumptions. The simple approach is applied to the water tetramer, pentamer and ring hexamer. For the tetramer and ring hexamer cases, artificial degeneracies of the intramolecular energies in the LMon model, owing to the high symmetry of the cluster, are correctly lifted. The general approach to obtain coupling constants is illustrated for the ring hexamer, where new fundamental energies are reported. Other, more rigorous approaches are suggested but not implemented.