Quasi-Diabatization Based on Minimizing Derivative Couplings in a Limited Configuration Space: Elimination of Boundary Condition Dependence

Abstract

Due to the cuspidal ridges of adiabatic potential energy surfaces (PESs) and singularities of nonadiabatic couplings (NACs), obtaining an analytical expression for the adiabatic Hamiltonian is difficult. Thereby, nonadiabatic dynamics simulations are often carried out on-the-fly, which is time-consuming. This motivates us to construct quasi-diabatic representations, which have smooth PESs and diabatic couplings. In this study, we propose a new quasi-diabatization method based on minimizing derivative couplings (MDC) in a limited configuration space. The boundary conditions are first considered and finally released to obtain the adiabatic-to-diabatic rotation angles and transformation matrices. As demonstrated in representative one- and two-dimensional models and the widely studied linear H₃ molecule, MDC performs significantly better than the direct integration quasi-diabatization approach. In particular, accurate diabatic potential energy matrices have been successfully obtained even when the NACs of all configurations in the considered space are nonnegligible.