The Numerical Equivalence of Diabatic and Adiabatic Representations in Diatomic Molecules

Abstract

The (stationary) Schrödinger equation for atomistic systems is solved using the adiabatic potential energy curves (PECs) and the associated adiabatic approximation. Despite being very simplistic, this approach is very powerful and used in nearly all practical applications. In cases when interactions between electronic states become important, the associated non-adiabatic effects are taken into account via the derivative couplings (DDRs), also known as non-adiabatic couplings (NACs). For diatomic molecules, the corresponding PECs in the adiabatic representation are characterized by avoided crossings. The alternative to the adiabatic approach is the diabatic representation, obtained via a unitary transformation of the adiabatic states by minimizing the DDRs. For diatomics, the diabatic representation has zero DDR and non-diagonal diabatic couplings (DCs) ensue. The two representations are fully equivalent and so should be the rovibronic energies and wavefunctions which result from the solution of the corresponding Schrödinger equations. We demonstrate (for the first time), the numerical equivalence between the adiabatic and diabatic rovibronic calculations of diatomic molecules, using the ab initio curves of yttrium oxide (YO) and carbon monohydride (CH) as examples of two-state systems, where YO is characterized by a strong NAC, while CH has a strong diabatic coupling. Rovibronic energies and wavefunctions are computed using a new diabatic module implemented in variational rovibronic code DUO. We show that it is important to include both the Diagonal Born-Oppenheimer Correction (DBOC) and non-diagonal DDRs. We also show that convergence of the vibronic energy calculations can strongly depend on the representation of nuclear motion used and that no one representation is best in all cases.