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Published on: October 2, 2016
Local Control Theory in Trajectory Surface Hopping Dynamics Applied to the Excited-State Proton Transfer of
Basile F E Curchod1,2, Thomas J Penfold3, Ursula Rothlisberger1
1Laboratory of Computational Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne (Switzerland).
Abstract:
The application of local control theory combined with nonadiabatic ab initio molecular dynamics to study the photoinduced intramolecular proton transfer reaction in 4-hydroxyacridine was investigated. All calculations were performed within the framework of linear-response time-dependent density functional theory. The computed pulses revealed important information about the underlying excited-state nuclear dynamics highlighting the involvement of collective vibrational modes that would normally be neglected in a study performed on model systems constrained to a subset of the full configuration space. This study emphasizes the strengths of local control theory for the design of pulses that can trigger chemical reactions associated with the population of a given molecular excited state. In addition, analysis of the generated pulses can help to shed new light on the photophysics and photochemistry of complex molecular systems.
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