The best of both Reps-Diabatized Gaussians on adiabatic surfaces

When simulating nonadiabatic molecular dynamics, choosing an electronic representation requires consideration of well-known trade-offs. The uniqueness and spatially local couplings of the adiabatic representation come at the expense of an electronic wave function that changes discontinuously with nuclear motion and associated singularities in the nonadiabatic coupling matrix elements. The quasi-diabatic representation offers a smoothly varying wave function and finite couplings, but identification of a globally well-behaved quasi-diabatic representation is a system-specific challenge. In this work, we introduce the diabatized Gaussians on adiabatic surfaces (DGAS) approximation, a variant of the ab initio multiple spawning (AIMS) method that preserves the advantages of both electronic representations while avoiding their respective pitfalls. The DGAS wave function is expanded in a basis of vibronic functions that are continuous in both electronic and nuclear coordinates, but potentially discontinuous in time. Because the time-dependent Schrödinger equation contains only first-order derivatives with respect to time, singularities in the second-derivative nonadiabatic coupling terms (i.e., diagonal Born-Oppenheimer correction; DBOC) at conical intersections are rigorously absent, though singular time-derivative couplings remain. Interpolation of the electronic wave function allows the accurate prediction of population transfer probabilities even in the presence of the remaining singularities. We compare DGAS calculations of the dynamics of photoexcited ethene to AIMS calculations performed in the adiabatic representation, including the DBOC. The 28 fs excited state lifetime observed in DGAS simulations is considerably shorter than the 50 fs lifetime observed in the adiabatic simulations. The slower decay in the adiabatic representation is attributable to the large, repulsive DBOC in the neighborhood of conical intersections. These repulsive DBOC terms are artifacts of the discontinuities in the individual adiabatic vibronic basis functions and therefore cannot reflect the behavior of the exact molecular wave function, which must be continuous.