Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-175). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-175). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-90).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Physics)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2005. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Time-dependent density functional theory calculations have been carried out to determine the complex first-order hyperpolarizability in the two-photon resonance region of the molecule IDS-Cab. Calculations show that three strongly absorbing states, in the ultraviolet region, are separated to the extent that no significant interference of the imaginary parts of the tensor elements of the first-order hyper-polarizability occurs. Consequently, and in contrast to experimental findings [27], no reduced imaginary parts of the first-order hyperpolarizability in the two-photon resonant region can be seen.

Computational chemists are concerned about two aspects when choosing between the myriad of theoretical methodologies: the accuracy (the "truth") and the computational cost (the tractability). Among the least expensive methods are the Hartree-Fock (HF), density functional theory (DFT), and second-order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) methods. While each of these methods yield excellent results in many cases, the inadequate inclusion of certain types of electron correlation (either high-orders or nondynamical) can produce erroneous results. The compromise for the computation of noncovalent interactions often comes from empirically scaling DFT and/or MP2 methods to fit benchmark data sets. The DFT method with an empirically fit dispersion term (DFT-D) often yields semi-quantitative results. The spin-component scaled MP2 (SCS-MP2) method parameterizes the same- and opposite-spin correlation energies and often yields less than 20% error for prototype noncovalent systems compared to chemically accurate CCSD(T) results. There is no simple fix for cases with a large degree of nondynamical correlation (such as transition metal-salen complexes). While testing standard and new DFT functionals on the spin-state energy gaps of transition metal-salen complexes, no DFT method produced reliable results compared to very robust CASPT3 results. Therefore each metal-salen complex must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine which methods are the most reliable. Utilizing a combination of DFT-D and SCS-MP2 methods, the reaction mechanism for the addition of cyanide to unsaturated imides catalyzed by the Al(Cl)-salen complex was performed. Various experimental observations are rationalized through this mechanism.

<p>Time-dependent density functional theory calculations have been carried out to determine the complex first-order hyperpolarizability in the two-photon resonance region of the molecule IDS-Cab. Calculations show that three strongly absorbing states, in the ultraviolet region, are separated to the extent that no significant interference of the imaginary parts of the tensor elements of the first-order hyper-polarizability occurs. Consequently, and in contrast to experimental findings [27], no reduced imaginary parts of the first-order hyperpolarizability in the two-photon resonant region can be seen.</p>

The Fast Multipole Method of Greengard and Rokhlin does the seemingly impossible: it approximates the quadratic scaling N-body problem in linear time. The key is to avoid explicitly computing the interactions between all pairs of N points. Instead, by organizing the data in a space-partitioning tree, distant interactions are quickly and efficiently approximated. Similarly, dual-tree algorithms, which approximate or eliminate parts of a computation using distance bounds, are the fastest algorithms for several fundamental problems in statistics and machine learning -- including all nearest neighbors, kernel density estimation, and Euclidean minimum spanning tree construction. We show that this overarching principle -- that by organizing points spatially, we can solve a seemingly quadratic problem in linear time -- can be generalized to problems involving interactions between sets of three or more points and can provide orders-of-magnitude speedups and guarantee runtimes that are asymptotically better than existing algorithms. We describe a family of algorithms, multi-tree algorithms, which can be viewed as generalizations of dual-tree algorithms. We support this thesis by developing and implementing multi-tree algorithms for two fundamental scientific applications: n-point correlation function estimation and Hartree-Fock theory. First, we demonstrate multi-tree algorithms for n-point correlation function estimation. The n-point correlation functions are a family of fundamental spatial statistics and are widely used for understanding large-scale astronomical surveys, characterizing the properties of new materials at the microscopic level, and for segmenting and processing images. We present three new algorithms which will reduce the dependence of the computation on the size of the data, increase the resolution in the result without additional time, and allow probabilistic estimates independent of the problem size through sampling. We provide both empirical evidence to support our claim of massive speedups and a theoretical analysis showing linear scaling in the fundamental computational task. We demonstrate the impact of a carefully optimized base case on this computation and describe our distributed, scalable, open-source implementation of our algorithms. Second, we explore multi-tree algorithms as a framework for understanding the bottleneck computation in Hartree-Fock theory, a fundamental model in computational chemistry. We analyze existing fast algorithms for this problem, and show how they fit in our multi-tree framework. We also show new multi-tree methods, demonstrate that they are competitive with existing methods, and provide the first rigorous guarantees for the runtimes of all of these methods. Our algorithms will appear as part of the PSI4 computational chemistry library.

Phonon anharmonicity is critical for describing various phenomena in crystals, including lattice thermal conductivity, thermal expansion, structural phase transitions, and many others. Including anharmonicity in the calculation of condensed matter observables developed rapidly in the past decade. First-principles computation of cubic phonon interactions have been performed in many systems, and the quartic interactions have begun to receive more attention. In this study, reliable Hamiltonians are constructed purely in terms of quadratic, cubic, and quartic irreducible derivatives, which are calculated efficiently and precisely using the lone and bundled irreducible derivative approaches (LID and BID). The resulting Hamiltonians give rise to a nontrivial many-phonon problem which requires some approximation in order to compute observables. We implemented self-consistent diagrammatic approaches to evaluate the phonon self-energy, including the Hartree-Fock approximation for phonons and quasiparticle perturbation theory, where both the 4-phonon loop and the real part of the 3-phonon bubble are employed during self-consistency. Additionally, we implemented molecular dynamics in order to yield the numerically exact solution in the classical limit. The molecular dynamics solution is robust for directly comparing to experimental results at sufficiently high temperatures, and for assessing our diagrammatic approaches in the classical limit. Anharmonic vibrational Hamiltonians were constructed for CaF₂, ThO₂, and UO₂. Diagrammatic approaches were used to evaluate the phonon self-energy, yielding the phonon lineshifts and linewidths and the thermal conductivity within the relaxation time approximation. Our systematic results allowed us to resolve the paradox of why first-principles phonon linewidths strongly disagree with results extracted from inelastic neutron scattering (INS). We demonstrated that the finite region in reciprocal space required in INS data analysis, the 𝑞-voxel, must be explicitly accounted for within the calculation in order to draw a meaningful comparison. We also demonstrated that the 𝑞-voxel is important to properly compare the spectrum measured in inelastic X-ray scattering (IXS), despite the fact that the ?-voxel is much smaller. Accounting for the 𝑞-voxel, we obtained good agreement for the scattering function linewidths up to intermediate temperatures. Additionally, good agreement was obtained for the thermal conductivity. Another topic we addressed is translation symmetry breaking caused by factors such as defects, chemical disorders, and magnetic order. These phenomena will lead to shifts and a broadening of the phonon spectrum, and formally the single-particle Green’s function encodes these effects. However, it is often desirable to obtain an approximate non-interacting spectrum that contains the effective shifts of the phonon frequencies, allowing straightforward comparison with experimentally measured scattering peak locations. Such an effective phonon dispersion can be obtained using a band unfolding technique, and in this study, we formulated unfolding in the context of irreducible derivatives. We showcased the unfolding of phonons in UZr₂, where chemical disorder is present, and compared the results with experimental IXS data. Additionally, we extended the unfolding technique to anharmonic terms and demonstrated this using 3rd and 4th order terms in the antiferromagnetic phase of UO₂.