In this paper, a combined QM/MM/PCM approach, named VBEFP/PCM, is presented for ab initio VB study with a solvent effect incorporated. In VBEFP/PCM, both short-range and long-range solvent effects are taken into account by effective fragment potential(EFP) and polarizable continuum model(PCM), respectively, while the solute molecules are described by valence bond(VB) wave function. Furthermore, VBEFP/PCM, along with VBPCM and VBEFP, is employed for the n??* vertical excitation of formaldehyde and acetone molecules in aqueous solution. The computational results show that VBEFP/PCM can provide the appropriate solvent shifts, whereas VBPCM underestimates the solvent shifts due to its lack of short-range solvent effect. The VBEFP results strongly rely upon the description of the short-range solvent effect. To explore the role of the solute's electronic structure in the solvent shift, resonance energy analysis during the excitation is performed. It was found that the solute's electronic polarization plays the most important role in the solvent shift. The ? resonance controls the variation of the solute's wave function during the n→?* vertical excitation, which leads to the blue solvent shifts.
We review our recent work on the methodology development of the excited-state properties for the molecules in vacuum and liquid solution.The general algorithms of analytical energy derivatives for the specific properties such as the first and second geometrical derivatives and IR/Raman intensities are demonstrated in the framework of the time-dependent density functional theory(TDDFT).The performance of the analytical approaches on the calculation of excited-state energy Hessian has also been shown.It is found that the analytical approaches are superior to the finite-difference method on the computational accuracy and efficiency.The computational cost for a TDDFT excited-state Hessian calculation is only 2–3 times as that for the DFT ground-state Hessian calculation.With the low computational complexity of the developed analytical approaches,it becomes feasible to realize the large-scale numerical calculations on the excited-state vibrational frequencies,vibrational spectroscopies and the electronic-structure parameters which enter the spectrum calculations of electronic absorption and emission,and resonance Raman spectroscopies for medium-to large-sized systems.
