Краткое содержание: | Introduction Alkali hydrides have been the object of intense theoretical and experimental interest for many years.1-12 Such molecules are at the intersection of various theoretical and experimental challenges, and now are tractable with high reliability via ab initio techniques. Using appropriate methods, it is possible to approach the experimental results with an overall good agreement for the ground and excited states. Their ground state is known to be of ionic character but dissociates to neutral fragments. A charge-transfer crossing is therefore expected to occur, making this problem attractive for diabatization. The nonadiabatic approach brings physical insight as shown in the previous studies of the LiH molecule,1,13,14 suggesting further calculations of non Bo -Oppenheimer effects such as transitions occurring in collisions,15-17 estimation of vibronic effects (vibronic shifts and nonradiative lifetime).12,18-20 In addition, the nonadiabatic picture can be used to improve the accuracy of calculations, by overcoming basis set limitations on the electron affinity of H, which is among the main limitations in the ab initio approach, particularly for the binding energy of the ground state.1 Undulations in the potential of the highly excited states were revealed and analyzed in the previous study of LiH1 and further confirmed in various recent works.11,21-23 These undulations were shown to be magnified in the nonadiabatic curves and to be related to intrinsic characteristics of the Rydberg atomic functions. Although realistic all-electron calculations are now feasible for the XH (X ) Na, K, Rb) molecule, we prefer to use the pseudopotential approach for the core and large basis sets for the valence and Rydbergs states, which allows accurate descriptions of the highest excited states for the whole alkali hydride series. The two electrons are then treated at the full configuration- interaction level (here CISD: singles-doubles configuration interaction). Core-valence correlation effects are quite important. Here we used the well-established operatorial approach proposed by Mu¨ller, Flesh, and Meyer.24 This paper presents the first ab initio calculations on highly excited states of the XH alkali hydride molecule (X ) Na, K, Rb), treating nearly all states dissociating below the ionic one [Na (3s, 3p, 4s, 3d, 4p, 5s, 4d, 4f), K(4s, 4p, 5s, 3d, 5p, 4d, 6s, 4f) and Rb (5s, 5p, 4d, 6s, 6p, 5d, 7s, 4f)]. The accuracy of the results can be judged by a comparison with the numerous theoretical and experimental data for the two lowest states. In addition to the adiabatic potential curves and dipoles moments, nonadiabatic curves are also derived. A further interest of this work is an improvement of both potential curves and dipole moments related to the H electron affinity correction effects allowed by the use of an efficient diabatization method. Therefore a rather complete set of data is presented about the XH (X ) Na, K, Rb) molecule from ground to highly excited states including adiabatic potential energy in 1Σ+ and permanent dipole and transition dipole moments, as well as potential electronic couplings, for the corresponding nonadiabatic states. This set of data will be further used to perform detailed spectroscopic studies including vibronic effects, radiative and nonradiative life times. In section 2 we briefly present the computational method and give numerical details. Section 3 is devoted to the presentation and discussion of the nonadiabatic and adiabatic results. Section 4 presents the permanent dipole moment for the adiabatic and nonadiabatic representations. Suggestions of spectroscopic interest are proposed in section 5. Finally, we summarize our results and conclude in section 6. 2. Methods 2.1. Computational Details. The alkali (sodium, potassium and rubidium) is treated as a one-electron system using the nonempirical pseudopotential of Barthelat and Durand,25 in its semilocal form,4 and as in LiH1 we used the abinitio package developed in Toulouse. We have used basis set 6s/5p/4d/2f for Na atom, 8s/5p/5d/2f for K atom and 8s/6p/6d/3f for Rb atom, where diffuse orbital exponents have been optimized to reproduce all the (3s, 3p, 4s, 3d, 4p, 5s, 4d, and 4f) atomic states for Na, (4s, 4p, 5s, 3d, 5p, 4d, 6s and 4f) atomic states for K and (5s, 5p, 4d, 6s, 6p, 5d, 7s and 4f) atomic states for Rb, while a * E-mail: khlifineji@yahoo.fr. more restricted basis set has been employed for hydrogen. J. Phys. Chem. A XXXX, xxx, 000 A 10.1021/jp9040138 CCC: $40.75 XXXX American Chemical Society Downloaded by AUSTRIA CONSORTIA on July 6, 2009 Published on July 1, 2009 on http://pubs.acs.org | doi: 10.1021/jp9040138 This 5s, 3p, 2d basis set can be considered as a reasonable compromise, able to describe both neutral and negatively charged (H-) hydrogen. A larger basis set for H could not be used because of numerical problems during the diabatization process, the main effect of this rather small H basis being an error (405 cm-1) in the H electron affinity, which however is corrected due to the nonadiabatic approach used. An extensive range of inte uclear distances has been considered, ranging from 2.45 to 500 bohr, in order to cover all the ionic-neutral crossings in the 1Σ+ symmetry. For the simulation of the interaction between the polarizable X+ (X ) Na, K, Rb) core with the valence electrons and H nucleus a core polarization potential is used, according to the operatorial approach of Mu¨ller, Flesh, and Meyer.24 Following the formulation of Foucrault, Millie, and Daudey26 cutoff functions with ldependent adjustable parameters are fitted to reproduce not only the first experimental ionization potential but also the lowest excited states of each l, namely, [2S(3s), 2P(3p), 2D(3d) and 2F(4f)] for Na, [2S(4s), 2P(4p), 2D(3d) and 2F(4f)] for K and [2S(5s), 2P(5p), 2D(4d) and 2F(4f)] for Rb. In the present work, the core polarizability of alkali and the optimized cutoff parameters are given in Table 1. The resulting atomic spectra are reported in Table 2 for X (Na, K and Rb) atom (in cm-1). The neutral dissociation limits reach a good accuracy for all the 3s, 3p, 4s, 3d, 4p, 5s, 4d and 4f states for Na atom, 4s, 4p, 5s, 3d, 5p, 4d, 6s and 4f states for K atom and 5s, 5p, 4d, 6s, 6p, 5d, 7s and 4f states for Rb atom, the largest error being 36 cm-1. 2.2. Diabatization. We briefly recall the principal lines of the method used; more details can be found in previous publications.1,29-31 The strategy is to compute a numerical estimate of the nonadiabatic coupling between the relevant adiabatic states and to cancel it by an appropriate unitary transformation according to the effective Hamiltonian theory.28,31 The estimate is however obtained using the large inte uclear intervals used in the molecular calculation instead of infinitesimal ones, and an effective overlap matrix is employed, in order to asymptotically ensure vanishing radial couplings and to get stable results. This nonadiabatic coupling calculation is closely related to an overlap matrix29,30 between the R-dependent adiabatic multiconfigurational states and an Ro fixed set of reference states. This diabatization method was shown to be among the most effective for molecular ab initio calculations.32 The set of reference states are the nonadiabatic states calculated for the larger neighboring distance. The calculation is performed from the largest distance where the nonadiabatic states are initialized to the adiabatic ones to the shortest one, similar to an integration scheme. This method leads to smaller residual couplings between the nonadiabatic states.33 |