No abstract

Centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) and ring polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) are two conceptually distinct extensions of path integral molecular dynamics that are able to generate approximate quantum dynamics of complex molecular systems. Both methods can be used to compute quasiclassical time correlation functions which have direct application in molecular spectroscopy; in particular, to infrared spectroscopy via dipole autocorrelation functions. The performance of both methods for computing vibrational spectra of several simple but representative molecular model systems is investigated systematically as a function of temperature and isotopic substitution. In this context both CMD and RPMD feature intrinsic problems which are quantified and investigated in detail. Based on the obtained results guidelines for using CMD and RPMD to compute infrared spectra of molecular systems are provided.

For decades, protonated methane, CH(5)(+), has provided new surprises and challenges for both experimentalists and theoreticians. This is because of the correlated large-amplitude motion of its five protons around the carbon nucleus, which leads to so-called hydrogen scrambling and causes a fluxional molecular structure. Here, the infrared spectra of all its H/D isotopologues have been measured using the 'Laser Induced Reactions' technique. Their shapes are found to be extremely dissimilar and depend strongly on the level of deuteration (only CD(5)(+) is similar to CH(5)(+)). All the spectra can be reproduced and assigned based on ab initio quantum simulations. The occupation of the topologically different sites by protons and deuterons is found to be strongly non-combinatorial and thus non-classical. This purely quantum-statistical effect implies a breaking of the classical symmetry of the site occupations induced by zero-point fluctuations, and this phenomenon is key to understanding the spectral changes studied here.

Centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) is a popular method to extract approximate quantum dynamics from path integral simulations. Very recently we have shown that CMD gas phase infrared spectra exhibit significant artificial redshifts of stretching peaks, due to the so-called "curvature problem" imprinted by the effective centroid potential. Here we provide evidence that for condensed phases, and in particular for liquid water, CMD produces pronounced artificial redshifts for high-frequency vibrations such as the OH stretching band. This peculiar behavior intrinsic to the CMD method explains part of the unexpectedly large quantum redshifts of the stretching band of liquid water compared to classical frequencies, which is improved after applying a simple and rough "harmonic curvature correction."

With the goal of computing quantum free energy landscapes of reactive (bio)chemical systems in multi-dimensional space, we combine the metadynamics technique for sampling potential energy surfaces with the ab initio path integral approach to treating nuclear quantum motion. This unified method is applied to the double proton transfer process in the formic acid dimer (FAD), in order to study the nuclear quantum effects at finite temperatures without imposing a one-dimensional reaction coordinate or reducing the dimensionality. Importantly, the ab initio path integral metadynamics technique allows one to treat the hydrogen bonds and concomitant proton transfers in FAD strictly independently and thus provides direct access to the much discussed issue of whether the double proton transfer proceeds via a stepwise or concerted mechanism. The quantum free energy landscape we compute for this H-bonded molecular complex reveals that the two protons move in a concerted fashion from initial to product state, yet world-line analysis of the quantum correlations demonstrates that the protons are as quantum-uncorrelated at the transition state as they are when close to the equilibrium structure.