Efficient determination of accurate atomic polarizabilities for polarizeable embedding calculations

Local-Field Effects in Linear Response Properties within a Polarizable Frozen Density Embedding Method

In this work, we present a polarizable frozen density embedding (FDE) method for calculating polarizabilities of coupled subsystems. The method (FDE-pol) combines a FDE method with an explicit polarization model such that the expensive freeze/thaw cycles can be bypassed, and approximate nonadditive kinetic potentials are avoided by enforcing external orthogonality between the subsystems. To describe the polarization of the frozen environment, we introduce a Hirshfeld partition-based density-dependent method for calculating the atomic polarizabilities of atoms in molecules, which alleviates the need to fit the atomic parameters to a specific system of interest or to a larger general set of molecules. We show that the Hirshfeld partition-based method predicts molecular polarizabilities close to the basis set limit, and thus, a single basis set-dependent scaling parameter can be introduced to improve the agreement against the reference polarizability data. To test the model, we characterized the uncoupled and coupled response of small interacting molecular complexes. Here, the coupled response properties include the perturbation of the frozen system due to the external perturbation which is ignored in the uncoupled response. We show that FDE-pol can accurately reproduce both the exact uncoupled polarizability and the coupled polarizabilities of the supermolecular systems. Using damped response theory, we also demonstrate that the coupled frequency-dependent polarizability can be described by including local field effects. The results emphasize the necessity of including local-field effects for describing the response properties of coupled subsystems, as well as the importance of accurate atomic polarizability models.

Avoiding Electron Spill-Out in QM/MM Calculations on Excited States with Simple Pseudopotentials

QM/MM calculations of electronic excitations with diffuse basis sets often have large errors due to spill-out of electrons from the quantum subsystem. The Pauli repulsion of the electrons by the environment has to be included to avoid this. We propose transferable atomic all-electron pseudopotentials that can readily be combined with most MM force fields to avoid electron spill-out. QM/MM excitation energies computed with time-dependent Hartree-Fock and the algebraic diagrammatic construction through second-order are benchmarked against supermolecular calculations to validate these new pseudopotentials. The QM/MM calculations with pseudopotentials give accurate results that are stable with augmentation of the basis set with diffuse functions. We show that the largest contribution to residual deviations from full QM calculations is caused by the missing London dispersion interaction.

Extension and evaluation of the D4 London-dispersion model for periodic systems

We present an extension of the DFT-D4 model [J. Chem. Phys., 2019, 150, 154122] for periodic systems. The main new ingredients are additional reference polarizabilities for highly-coordinated group 1-5 elements derived from pseudo-periodic electrostatically-embedded cluster calculations. To illustrate the performance of the updated method, several test cases are considered, for which we compare D4 to its predecessor D3(BJ), as well as to a comprehensive set of other dispersion-corrected methods. The largest improvements are observed for solid-state polarizabilities of 16 inorganic salts, where the D4 model achieves an unprecedented accuracy, surpassing its predecessor as well as other, computationally much more demanding approaches. For cell volumes and lattice energies of two sets of chemically diverse molecular crystals, the accuracy gain is less pronounced compared to the already excellently performing D3(BJ) method. For the challenging adsorption energies of small organic molecules on metallic as well as on ionic surfaces, DFT-D4 provides values in good agreement with experimental and/or high-level references. These results suggest the application of the proposed D4 model as a physically improved yet computationally efficient dispersion correction for standard DFT calculations as well as low-cost approaches like semi-empirical or even force-field models.

Analytic Excited State Gradients for the QM/MM Polarizable Embedded Second-Order Algebraic Diagrammatic Construction for the Polarization Propagator PE-ADC(2)

An implementation of a QM/MM embedding in a polarizable environment is presented for second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory, MP2, for ground state energies and molecular gradients and for the second-order Algebraic Diagrammatic Construction, ADC(2), for excitation energies and excited state molecular gradients. In this implementation of PE-MP2 and PE-ADC(2), the polarizable embedded Hartree-Fock wave function is used as uncorrelated reference state. The polarization-correlation cross terms for the ground and excited states are included in this model via an approximate coupling density. A Lagrangian formulation is used to derive the relaxed electron densities and molecular gradients. The resolution-of-the-identity approximation speeds up the calculation of four-index electron repulsion integrals in the molecular orbital basis. As a first application, the method is used to study the photophysical properties of host-guest complexes where the accuracy and weaknesses of the model are also critically examined. It is demonstrated that the ground state geometries of the full quantum mechanical calculation for the supermolecule can be well reproduced. For excited state geometries, the deviations from the supermolecular calculation are slightly larger, but still the environment effects are captured qualitatively correctly, and energy gaps between the ground and excited states are obtained with sufficient accuracy.

Efficient determination of accurate atomic polarizabilities for polarizeable embedding calculations

We evaluate embedding potentials, obtained via various methods, used for polarizable embedding computations of excitation energies of para-nitroaniline in water and organic solvents as well as of the green fluorescent protein. We found that isotropic polarizabilities derived from DFTD3 dispersion coefficients correlate well with those obtained via the LoProp method. We show that these polarizabilities in conjunction with appropriately derived point charges are in good agreement with calculations employing static multipole moments up to quadrupoles and anisotropic polarizabilities for both computed systems. The (partial) use of these easily-accessible parameters drastically reduces the computational effort to obtain accurate embedding potentials especially for proteins. © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Computational Chemistry Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.