Appraisal of Surface Hopping as a Tool for Modeling Condensed Phase Linear Absorption Spectra

Whereas surface hopping is usually used to study populations and mean-field dynamics to study coherences, in two recent papers, we described a procedure for calculating dipole-dipole correlation functions (and therefore absorption spectra) directly from ensembles of surface hopping trajectories. We previously applied this method to a handful of one-dimensional model problems intended to mimic the gas phase. In this article, we now benchmark this new procedure on a set of multidimensional model problems intended to mimic the condensed phase and compare our results against other standard semiclassical methods. By comparison, we demonstrate that methods that include only dynamical information from one PES (the standard Kubo approaches) exhibit large discrepancies with the results of exact quantum dynamics. Furthermore, for model problems with nonadiabatic excited state dynamics but no quantized vibrational structure in the spectra, our surface hopping approach performs comparably to using Ehrenfest dynamics to calculate the electronic coherences. That being said, however, when quantized vibrational structures are present in the spectra but the electronic states are uncoupled, performing the dynamics on the mean PES still outperforms our present method. These benchmark results should influence future studies that use ensembles of independent semiclassical trajectories to model linear as well as multidimensional spectra in the condensed phase.