Direct quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical simulations of two-dimensional vibrational responses: N-methylacetamide in water

Multidimensional infrared (IR) spectroscopy has emerged as a viable tool to study molecular structure and dynamics in condensed phases, and the third-order vibrational response function is the central quantity underlying various nonlinear IR spectroscopic techniques, such as pump-probe, photon echo and two-dimensional (2D) IR spectroscopy. In this paper, a new computational method is presented that calculates this nonlinear response function in the classical limit from a series of classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, employing a quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) force field. The method relies on the stability matrix formalism where the dipole-dipole quantum mechanical commutators appearing in the exact quantum response function are replaced by the corresponding Poisson brackets. We present the formulation and computational algorithm of the method for both the classical and the QM/MM force fields and apply it to the 2D IR spectroscopy of carbon monoxide (CO) and N-methylacetamide (NMA), each solvated in a water cluster. The conventional classical force field with harmonic bond potentials is shown to be incapable of producing a reliable 2D IR signal because intramolecular vibrational anharmonicity, essential to the production of the nonlinear signal, is absent in such a model. The QM/MM force field, on the other hand, produces distinct 2D spectra for the NMA and CO systems with clear vertical splitting and cross peaks, reflecting the vibrational anharmonicities and the vibrational couplings between the underlying vibrational modes, respectively. In the NMA spectrum, the coupling between the amide I and II modes is also well reproduced. While attaining the converged spectrum is found to be challenging with this method, with an adequate amount of computing it can be straightforwardly applied to new systems containing multiple chromophores with little modeling effort, and therefore it would be useful in understanding the multimode 2D IR spectrum of complex molecular systems.