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ABSTRACT: Quinones are versatile biological electron acceptors and mobile electron carriers
in redox processes. We present the rst ab initio calculations of the width of the 2Au shape
resonance in the para-benzoquinone anion, the simplest member of the quinone family. This
resonance state located at 2.5 eV above the ground state of the anion is believed to be a gateway
state for electron attachment in redox processes involving quinones. We employ the equation-
of-motion coupled-cluster method for electron anity augmented by a complex-absorbing
potential (CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD) to calculate the resonance position and width. The calculated width, 0.013 eV, is in excellent
agreement with the width of the resonant peak in the photodetachment spectrum, thus supporting the assignment of the band to
resonance excitation to the autodetaching 2Au state. The methodological aspects of CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD calculations of
resonances positions and widths in medium-sized molecules, such as basis set and CAP box size eects, are also discussed.
electron transition from the 2Au state, whereas the decay of 2B3u emerges as a single state with a square-integrable wave function
is a two-electron processes. Thus, 2Au and 2B3u can be classied and complex eigenvalue:
as shape and Feshbach resonances, respectively. The latter are i
expected to have longer lifetimes owing to the two-particle E = ER
2 (1)
character of the decay, which is driven by electron
correlation.21,22 Real and imaginary parts of the complex eigenvalue are
Despite the large positive electron anity, electron attach- associated with resonance position (ER) and width (),
ment to neutral pBQ proceeds more eciently via excited respectively. Specically, an imaginary potential absorbing the
electronic states of the anion. Unusual solvent, temperature, outgoing tail of the resonance wave function is added to the
and pressure dependence of the electron attachment rates to Hamiltonian
benzoquinone2426 have been explained by an inverted Marcus
H = H iW (2)
regime for the direct electron attachment to the ground state,
leading to a large activation energy and ecient electron where W is chosen to have quadratic form with the size of the
capture via excited states of the anion and their further box dened by RX, RY, and RZ parameters
relaxation to the ground state. Hence, the positions and
lifetimes of these metastable states are of primary importance W = Wx + Wy + Wz
for understanding the electron-transfer processes in quinones.
0, |ri| R i
Electron-detachment resonances were accurately character-
ized by photodetachment and resonant photodetachment Wi =
2
i = X, Y , Z
photoelectron spectroscopy of the jet-cooled pBQ anions.19 A (|ri| R i) , |ri| R i (3)
pBQ photodetachment spectrum that represents the depend- The CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD approach combines the CAP
ence of the total yield of the ejected electrons on the excitation technique with the EOM-EA-CCSD formalism,3336 and,
energy is shown in Figure 1. The intensity in the photodetach- thus, extends the capabilities of the method originally
ment spectrum corresponds to the collective yield of developed for bound electronic states to the description of
photoelectrons with all possible kinetic energy values. The scattering resonances. Diagonalization of the similarity-trans-
intensity, in general, rises monotonously with photon energy formed CAP-modied Hamiltonian, H = eTHeT, in the
above the lowest detachment energy threshold in the case of basis of one-particle and one-hole-two-particle congurations
direct detachment into the continuum.19,27,28 Nonmonotonous derived from the closed-shell CAP-HF reference, yields
features are associated with strong resonant absorption into complex electron attachment energies. Real and imaginary
metastable excited states of the anion followed by auto- parts of the eigenvalue give the resonance position and width,
ionization. Indeed, multiple sharp resonances and a single respectively (eq 1). T are coupled-cluster substitution
broad peak have been observed in the photodetachment spectra operators with the corresponding amplitudes obtained by
of pBQ in the 2.03.0 eV region. On the basis of the order-of- solving CCSD equations for the CAP-modied H (eq 2).
magnitude dierence in the resonances widths and estimated CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD has been shown to provide accurate
excitation energies, the sharp features were assigned to estimates of resonance position and lifetime for a test set of
Feshbach resonances, whereas the broad band at 2.5 eV was small molecular systems.37,38
attributed to the 2Au shape resonance. The lifetime of the state The focus of this work is on the assignment of the resonance
estimated from the width of the peak is 25 fs. Recent feature at 2.5 eV in the photodetachment spectrum of the gas-
computational studies of electronic structure of pBQ and pBQ phase pBQ. Because the results of CAP-based calculations
also support this assignment based on the estimates of the depend on several user-dened parameters, for example, CAP
vertical excitation energies of the anion.11,12 Yet, our multi- box size and a criterion used to extract the resonance position
congurational quasidegenerate perturbation theory calcula- and width from the -trajectories (see below), we rst discuss
tions indicate that there are two bright states (2Au and 2B3u) the performance of the CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD method and
that absorb in this energy range. Although vertical excitation potential pitfalls in the interpretation of calculations. Speci-
energies dier signicantly, the adiabatic excitation energies are cally, we address the following: (i) criteria for distinguishing
very close, 2.33 and 2.39 eV for 2Au and 2B3u states, respectively resonance and pseudocontinuum states (that can appear as false
(Figure 1). The simulated shapes of the 2Au 2B2g and 2B3u resonances) based on the results of CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD
2
B2g transitions overlap signicantly (Figure S2, SI). Recent calculations and (ii) the eects of the box size (CAP onset) and
time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy studies of pBQ one-electron basis set in the quantitative prediction of the
demonstrated ultrafast decay of the metastable excited states resonance position and width.
on a sub-40 fs time scale to the bound ground state; however, The calculations were performed at the optimized ground-
no direct estimate of the shape resonance lifetime could be state geometry of the pBQ radical anion, unless stated
inferred from the experiment.11 Hence, robust theoretical otherwise. Two complementary computational approaches
prediction of the resonance position and lifetime is essential for have been employed. Multistate multireference perturbation
understanding the complex picture of competing autodetach- theory has been used for accurate characterization of the
ment and internal conversion in this system. This is the rst energies of the ground and the two bright excited states of the
attempt to characterize the widths of resonances in the pBQ anion. The 2B3u state leading conguration can be derived from
photodetachment spectrum from the rst principles. the 1Ag reference in a two-electron excitation manner: electron
We report the complex-absorbing potential equation-of- attachment to the b2g orbital and electron promotion from the
motion coupled-cluster (CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD) calculations of b3u to b2g orbital (Figure 1). This type of states is problematic
the 2Au resonance position and width. The CAP technique2932 for the EOM-EA-CCSD method. Multireference perturbation
belongs to the group of methods that transform the theory approaches, on the contrary, do not suer from this
Hamiltonian into a non-Hermitian one, such that a resonance shortcoming as all possible levels of excitations within the active
1054 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00207
J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 10531058
The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters Letter
Figure 2. -trajectories for the pseudocontinuum and resonance 2Au states. (A) Two HF MOs giving rise to the leading congurations in the target
open-shell anionic states (2Au). (B) CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD/cc-pVDZ+[24s] -trajectories for the two states that are close in energy to the
experimental resonance position (top) and changes in the amplitudes of one-particle excitations (R1, real part) into valence and diuse au orbitals
along the -trajectories. (C) CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD/cc-pVTZ+[24s] -trajectories for the two 2Au states and changes in the amplitudes of one-
particle excitations (R1, real part) into valence and diuse au orbitals along the -trajectories. RX = 8 , RY =10 , and RZ = 15 .
space are treated at the same footing. The methods, however, trajectories, the series of eignenvalues computed for dierent
do not account for the metastable character of the state. Thus, values of (eq 2), and relevant orbitals are shown in Figure 2.
the CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD approach has been employed to Interestingly, the two states are of mixed character at = 0,
characterize the position and the width of the 2Au resonance. with both congurations contributing with the similar weights.
The 2Au dominant conguration is formed from the 1Ag closed In particular, the corresponding EOM-EA-CCSD/cc-pVDZ
shell reference upon single electron attachment to au orbital, +[24s] weights (calculated as squares of the amplitudes shown
and thus, the state can be reliably described with EOM-EA- in Figure 2 for 22Au state) are 0.441 and 0.531 for the diuse
CCSD and CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD methods. Specically, the and valence congurations, respectively. The stronger coupling
equilibrium structure was obtained using extended multi- between the valence and diuse congurations in the case of
reference quasidenerate perturbation theory, XMCQDPT2,39 the smaller cc-pVDZ basis can be tentatively attributed to the
with the daug-cc-pVTZ basis set. The model space was spanned incompleteness of the valence basis subset and resulting basis
by ten CASSCF wave functions. The active space included all functions borrowing from the diuse subset that causes a strong
and lone pair orbitals. State-averaging over the 10 lowest roots mixture of valence and diuse congurations. Indeed, the eect
was employed for the CASSCF step. The Firey package40 has is less pronounced for the case of larger cc-pVTZ basis. At
been used for the XMCQDPT2 calculations. The shapes of the larger , the valence and diuse congurations decouple as the
active orbitals are given in the SI (Figure S1). Frequency resonance state becomes stabilized. Note that the character of
analysis was performed using CASSCF with the same active the two orbitals is conserved along the -trajectories (SI, Figure
space and 6-311++G(2d,p) basis set for the molecular S3). The higher-energy state in the cc-pVDZ basis (Figure 2B)
geometries optimized at the same level of theory using and the lower-energy state in the cc-pVTZ basis (Figure 2C)
GAMESS(US).23 The cc-pVDZ and cc-pVTZ dunning valence acquire pronounced valence-like character inherent to reso-
basis sets employed in the CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD calculations nance states. In contrast, the other state (the lower-energy state
were augmented by 24 additional diuse functions (+[24s]); in the cc-pVDZ basis and the higher-energy state in the cc-
eight ghost atoms were located 1.45 above and below the pVTZ basis) becomes dominated by a conguration with an
four ring carbon atoms, each hosting three diuse s-type electron occupying the diuse orbital and, thus, is a
functions. This conguration of the ghost atoms ensures proper pseudocontinuum state. The dierent character of the states
symmetry of the resulting diuse orbitals required for coupling also manifests itself in a more compact shape of the trajectory
with the 2Au resonance. The exponents are given in the SI. for the resonance state in comparison to the pseudocontinuum
CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD calculations were performed using the one. Thus, the assignment of the states to either pseudocontin-
Q-Chem package.41 uum (false resonance) or true resonance states must be done
Conventional EOM-EA-CCSD ( = 0) calculations yield two with care, taking into account both shapes of the trajectories
Au states lying in the 2.63.6 eV energy range representing the and the character of the wave functions.
resonance and a discretized continuum state. The states are in- Once the resonance state is identied, one can analyze the
phase and out-of-phase combinations of two congurations trajectory and extract the resonance position and lifetime. We
corresponding to an unpaired electron occupying either a used two approaches for the analysis of -trajectories. In the
valence or diuse au orbital (Figure 2A). Representative - rst one, the position and lifetime were extracted from the
1055 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00207
J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 10531058
The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters Letter
trajectory point corresponding to the minimum of the extracted from the uncorrected trajectory are close for this
trajectory velocity, |dE/d| min.29 The second approach system, 3.08 and 0.09 eV (Figure 3E,F).
is a variation of the original rst-order correction suggested by The resonance position and width computed with the CAP-
Meyer29 and is based on deperturbation of the real and based approach are known to depend on the CAP onset.29,37,42
imaginary parts of the eigenvalue using rst-order perturbation The shape of the au orbital suggests that one can expect the 2Au
theory37 resonance to be most sensitive to the change of the box size in
URe = E Re Tr[WI] the direction of the axis perpendicular to the molecular plane (x
(4)
axis). Thus, we xed the values of RY and RZ and gradually
UIm = E Im + Tr[WR ] (5) increased RX from 6 to 12 with an increment of 1 . The
resulting values of the resonance position and lifetime for the
where W is a one-particle CAP operator dened in eq 3 and R/ cc-pVDZ basis and boxes of various sizes are listed in Table 1.
I are real and imaginary parts of the one-particle CAP-EOM- One can see that ER and values vary from 3.13 to 3.07 and
EA-CCSD target state density matrix. One then searches for the from 0.146 to 0.027 eV, respectively. The lifetimes and
minima of the derivative of URe and UIm with respect to resonance positions almost do not change for RX 11 . No
independently. Representative CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD/cc-pVDZ stationary points on the UIm trajectories have been observed for
+[24s] -trajectories are shown in Figure 3. One can see that the boxes with RX of 11 and 12 . As follows from Table 1, the
variation in the CAP onset from 8 to 12 results in only
moderate shifts in the resonance position and width. Thus, the
results are stable with respect to this parameter starting from RX
= 8 . To quantify the eect of the valence one-electron basis
set, we performed CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD/cc-pVTZ+[24s]
calculation for one representative box size (RX = 8 ). The
results are given in Table 2 and in Figure 4. One can see that
the increase of the valence basis set signicantly improves the
description of the resonance position, whereas the width is
almost unaected. The resonance parameters extracted from
the deperturbed trajectories exhibit similar variations with CAP
onset to those obtained from the uncorrected ones. The
previous test studies of resonances in small molecules37
indicated greater stability of resonance position and width
estimated from the corrected trajectories with respect to the
CAP box size in comparison to the ones obtained using velocity
criterion applied to original trajectories. We, therefore, rely on
the former approach to derive the best estimate of the 2Au
resonance position and width. Thus, our best CAP-EOM-EA-
CCSD estimates of the 2Au resonance position and width are
Figure 3. CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD/cc-pVDZ+[24s] -trajectory for the
2
Au resonance. (A) Corrected resonance position, ER, ER = URe
2.87 and 0.013 eV, respectively. We also analyzed the
E(2B2g). Derivative of ER extracted from corrected trajectories with convergence of the resonance position and lifetime with the
respect to (B). Corrected width = 2UIm (C) and its derivative size and the type of the diuse subset. Two bases have been
(D). Uncorrected -trajectory, ER = ERe E(2B2g) and = 2EIm (E). considered, [40s] and [24s8p], in which the original [24s] basis
Velocity of the uncorrected trajectory (F). Arrows indicate the was augmented with 2s and 1p functions at each ghost atom,
stabilized resonance (position and width). RX = 8 , RY = 10 , and RZ respectively. As follows from Table 2, addition of s-type basis
= 15 . functions does not lead to signicant changes in resonace
position or width. Addition of p-type basis functions improves
the real and imaginary parts of the corrected trajectories exhibit the description of the resonance position, yet it does not aect
minima at equal to 3.4 102 (Figure 3A,B) and 6.5 102, the width. Thus, we believe that [24s] diuse subset enables
respectively (Figure 3C,D). The resulting values of the reliable description of coupling to the continuum and
resonance position and width are 3.09 and 0.06 eV. The values consequently the lifetimes of the resonance state.
a
The size of the CAP box is varied along the X direction (RX). RY = 10 , and RZ = 15 , unless stated otherwise.
Table 2. Energy (ER) and Width () for the 2Au Resonance of the pBQ Aniona
URe UIm E
method basis ER, eV optR , eV optIm ER, eV , eV opt
2 2
CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD cc-pVDZ+[24s] 3.09 3.4 10 0.062 6.5 10 3.08 0.085 3.7 102
CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD cc-pVDZ+[40s] 3.08 3.5 102 0.058 6.6 102 3.08 0.079 3.4 102
CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD cc-pVDZ+[24s8p] 2.97 2.4 102 0.050 4.0 102 2.98 0.094 1.6 102
CAP-EOM-EA-CCSD cc-pVTZ+[24s] 2.87 3.0 102 0.013 3.8 102 2.89 0.027 1.2 102
XMCQDPT2 daug-cc-pVTZ 2.55
experiment19 ER = 2.5; = 0.025
a
RX = 8, RY = 10, and RZ = 15 ().
electronic structure model. To estimate the eects of the
geometry changes on the 2Au state lifetime, we also considered AUTHOR INFORMATION
the equilibrium geometry of the neutral pBQ. The computed
width of the 2Au resonance is 0.041 eV, which is signicantly Notes
smaller than the recent estimate of 0.346 eV obtained with the The authors declare no competing nancial interest.
1057 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00207
J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 10531058
The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters Letter
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to Prof. Anna Krylov for the valuable comments
(21) Stolow, A. Femtosecond time-resolved photoelectron spectros-
copy of polyatomic molecules. Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem. 2003, 54, 89
119.
on the manuscript. The authors also thank Prof. Weinkauf for (22) Bravaya, K.; Zuev, D.; Epifanovsky, E.; Krylov, A. Complex-
providing photodetachment spectra for the para-benzqouinone scaled equation-of-motion coupled-cluster method with single and
anion. double substitutions for autoionizing excited states: Theory,