Semiclassical initial value representation study of internal conversion rates

Internal conversion is an inherently quantum mechanical process. To date, "on the fly" computation of internal conversion rates is limited to harmonic approximations, which would seem to be especially unsuitable, given that the typical transition to the ground electronic state occurs at energies which are far from the harmonic limit. It is thus of interest to study the applicability of the semi-classial initial value representation (SCIVR) approach which is in principle amenable to on the fly studies even with "many" degrees of freedom. In this paper we study the applicability of the Herman-Kluk (HK) SCIVR to a model system with two coupled and anharmonic degrees of freedom. We find that (a) the HK SCIVR is a good approximation to the exact quantum dynamics; (b) computation of the first order correction to the HK-SCIVR approximation corroborates the accuracy; (c) by studying a large parameter range, we find that the harmonic approximation is mostly unsatisfactory; and (d) for the specific model used, the coupling between the modes was found to be relatively unimportant. These results imply that the HK-SCIVR methodology is a good candidate for on the fly studies of internal conversion processes of "large" molecules. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3599053]