TY - JOUR

T1 - Vibrational relaxation and decoherence in structured environments: a numerical investigation

AU - Bonfanti, M.

AU - Hughes, K.H.

AU - Burghardt, I.

AU - Martinazzo, R.

N1 - This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Bonfanti, M., Hughes, K. H., Burghardt, I. and Martinazzo, R. (2015), Vibrational relaxation and decoherence in structured environments: a numerical investigation. Ann. Phys., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.201500144

PY - 2015/7/3

Y1 - 2015/7/3

N2 - Vibrational relaxation is a key issue in chemical reaction dynamics in condensed phase and at the gas-surface interface, where the environment is typically highly structured and cannot be expressed in terms of a simple friction coefficient. Rather, full knowledge of the coupling of the molecular oscillator to the environment is required, as typically subsumed in the spectral density of the environmental coupling. Here, we focus on harmonic Brownian motion and investigate the effectiveness of classical, canonical position autocorrelation functions to compute the spectral density of the coupling needed to describe vibrational relaxation in complex environments. Classical dynamics is performed on model systems, and several effects are investigated in detail, notably the presence of anharmonicity, the role of a high-frequency “Debye” cutoff in the environment and the influence of the detailed structure of the latter. The spectral densities are then used in standard independent oscillator Hamiltonian models which are numerically solved at T = 0 K to investigate quantum relaxation and decoherence

AB - Vibrational relaxation is a key issue in chemical reaction dynamics in condensed phase and at the gas-surface interface, where the environment is typically highly structured and cannot be expressed in terms of a simple friction coefficient. Rather, full knowledge of the coupling of the molecular oscillator to the environment is required, as typically subsumed in the spectral density of the environmental coupling. Here, we focus on harmonic Brownian motion and investigate the effectiveness of classical, canonical position autocorrelation functions to compute the spectral density of the coupling needed to describe vibrational relaxation in complex environments. Classical dynamics is performed on model systems, and several effects are investigated in detail, notably the presence of anharmonicity, the role of a high-frequency “Debye” cutoff in the environment and the influence of the detailed structure of the latter. The spectral densities are then used in standard independent oscillator Hamiltonian models which are numerically solved at T = 0 K to investigate quantum relaxation and decoherence

U2 - 10.1002/andp.201500144

DO - 10.1002/andp.201500144

M3 - Article

JO - Annalen der Physik

JF - Annalen der Physik

SN - 1521-3889

ER -