Vibrational properties of molecular crystals are constantly used as structural fingerprints, in order to identify both the chemical nature and the structural arrangement of molecules. The simulation of these properties is typically very costly, especially when dealing with response properties of materials to e.g. electric fields, which require a good description of the perturbed electronic density. In this work, we use Gaussian process regression (GPR) to predict the static polarizability and dielectric susceptibility of molecules and molecular crystals. We combine this framework with ab initio molecular dynamics to predict their anharmonic vibrational Raman spectra. We stress the importance of data representation, symmetry, and locality, by comparing the performance of different flavors of GPR. In particular, we show the advantages of using a recently developed symmetry-adapted version of GPR. As an examplary application, we choose Paracetamol as an isolated molecule and in different crystal forms. We obtain accurate vibrational Raman spectra in all cases with fewer than 1000 training points, and obtain improvements when using a GPR trained on the molecular monomer as a baseline for the crystal GPR models. Finally, we show that our methodology is transferable across polymorphic forms: we can train the model on data for one crystal structure, and still be able to accurately predict the spectrum for a second polymorph. This procedure provides an independent route to access electronic structure properties when performing force-evaluations on empirical force-fields or machine-learned potential energy surfaces.

Within density-functional theory, perturbation theory(PT) is the state-of-the-art formalism for assessing the response to homogeneous electric fields and the associated material properties, e.g., polarizabilities, dielectric constants, and Raman intensities. Here, we derive a real-space formulation of PT and present an implementation within the all-electron, numeric atom-centered orbitals electronic structure code FHI-aims that allows for massively parallel calculations. As demonstrated by extensive validation, we achieve a rapid computation of accurate response properties of molecules and solids. As an application showcase, we present harmonic and anharmonic Raman spectra, the latter obtained by combining hundreds of thousands of PT calculations with ab initio molecular dynamics. By using the PBE exchange-correlation functional with many-body van der Waals corrections, we obtain spectra in good agreement with experiment especially with respect to lineshapes for the isolated paracetamol molecule and two polymorphs of the paracetamol crystal.

The low-frequency range of vibrational spectra is sensitive to collective vibrations of the lattice. In molecular crystals, it can be decisive to identify the structure of different polymorphs, and in addition, it plays an important role on the magnitude of the temperature-dependent component of vibrational free energy differences between these crystals. In this work we study the vibrational Raman spectra and vibrational density of states of different polymorphs of the flexible Aspirin and Paracetamol crystals based on dispersion-corrected density-functional theory, density-functional perturbation theory, and ab initio molecular dynamics. We examine the effect of quasi-harmonic lattice expansion and compare the results of harmonic theory and the time correlation formalism for vibrational spectra. Lattice expansion strongly affects the collective vibrations below 300 cm −1 , but it is significantly less important at higher frequencies, while thermal nuclear motion can be important in the full vibrational range. We also observe that the inclusion or neglect of many-body van der Waals dispersion interactions do not cause large differences in the low-frequency range of Raman spectra or vibrational density of states, provided the lattice constants are fixed. We obtain quantitative agreement with experimental room-temperature Raman spectra below 300 cm −1 for all polymorphs studied. Examining the two-dimensional correlations between different vibrations, we find which modes show a larger degree of anharmonic coupling to others, providing a possible route to assess the accuracy of harmonic free energy evaluations in different cases.

In this work we solve two problems related to the calculation of static and dynamical magnetic properties with ab initio theories. First, we show that the dependence of the dynamical magnetic dipole moment on the reference point of the multipole expansion and on the gauge origin of the vector potential have a clear physical significance. They are due to a dynamical electric dipole moment and an electric field, respectively. Both are fully determined by the experimental setup and do not pose any fundamental problem, contrary to what is commonly assumed. Second, in the static case, any dependence on the gauge origin is an artifact of the computational method. We show that the artificial dependence on the gauge origin can be removed in an elegant way by the introduction of a sum rule that puts the diamagnetic and paramagnetic contributions on equal footing. Our approach can be applied to calculate any magnetic observable that can be derived from the current density, and can be used in combination with any ab initio theory from which it can be obtained. To illustrate our method we apply it here to time-dependent current-density-functional theory for the calculation of static and dynamical magnetizabilities of molecules.