Nonempirical Simulations of Inhomogeneous Broadening of Electronic Transitions in Solution: Predicting Band Shapes in One- and Two-Photon Absorption Spectra of Chalcones

作者：Bednarska, Joanna^*; Zalesny, Robert^*; Tian, Guangjun; Murugan, Natarajan Arul; Agren, Hans; Bartkowiak, Wojciech^*

来源：Molecules, 2017, 22(10): 1643.

DOI：10.3390/molecules22101643

• density functional theory
• two-photon absorption
• vibrationally-resolved spectra
• hybrid QM/MM solvation models

We have examined several approaches relying on the Polarizable Embedding (PE) scheme to predict optical band shapes for two chalcone molecules in methanol solution. The PE-TDDFT and PERI-CC2 methods were combined with molecular dynamics simulations, where the solute geometry was kept either as rigid, flexible or partly-flexible (restrained) body. The first approach, termed RBMD-PE-TDDFT, was employed to estimate the inhomogeneous broadening for subsequent convolution with the vibrationally-resolved spectra of the molecule in solution determined quantum-mechanically (QM). As demonstrated, the RBMD-PE-TDDFT/QM-PCM approach delivers accurate band widths, also reproducing their correct asymmetric shapes. Further refinement can be obtained by the estimation of the inhomogeneous broadening using the RBMD-PERI-CC2 method. On the other hand, the remaining two approaches (FBMD-PE-TDDFT and ResBMD-PE-TDDFT), which lack quantum-mechanical treatment of molecular vibrations, lead to underestimated band widths. In this study, we also proposed a simple strategy regarding the rapid selection of the exchange-correlation functional for the simulations of vibrationally-resolved one-and two-photon absorption spectra based on two easy-to-compute metrics.

• 出版日期2017-10
• 单位燕山大学