Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses computer simulations to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses methods of theoretical chemistry incorporated into computer programs to calculate the structures and properties of molecules, groups of molecules, and solids. The importance of this subject stems from the fact that, with the exception of some relatively recent findings related to the hydrogen molecular ion, achieving an accurate quantum mechanical depiction of chemical systems analytically, or in a closed form, is not feasible. The complexity inherent in the many-body problem exacerbates the challenge of providing detailed descriptions of quantum mechanical systems. While computational results normally complement information obtained by chemical experiments, it can occasionally predict unobserved chemical phenomena.
Sir John Anthony Pople was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.
MOLPRO is a software package used for accurate ab initio quantum chemistry calculations. It is developed by Peter Knowles at Cardiff University and Hans-Joachim Werner at Universität Stuttgart in collaboration with other authors.
Q-Chem is a general-purpose electronic structure package featuring a variety of established and new methods implemented using innovative algorithms that enable fast calculations of large systems on various computer architectures, from laptops and regular lab workstations to midsize clusters, HPCC, and cloud computing using density functional and wave-function based approaches. It offers an integrated graphical interface and input generator; a large selection of functionals and correlation methods, including methods for electronically excited states and open-shell systems; solvation models; and wave-function analysis tools. In addition to serving the computational chemistry community, Q-Chem also provides a versatile code development platform.
NWChem is an ab initio computational chemistry software package which includes quantum chemical and molecular dynamics functionality. It was designed to run on high-performance parallel supercomputers as well as conventional workstation clusters. It aims to be scalable both in its ability to treat large problems efficiently, and in its usage of available parallel computing resources. NWChem has been developed by the Molecular Sciences Software group of the Theory, Modeling & Simulation program of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The early implementation was funded by the EMSL Construction Project.
Spartan is a molecular modelling and computational chemistry application from Wavefunction. It contains code for molecular mechanics, semi-empirical methods, ab initio models, density functional models, post-Hartree–Fock models, and thermochemical recipes including G3(MP2) and T1. Quantum chemistry calculations in Spartan are powered by Q-Chem.
Semi-empirical quantum chemistry methods are based on the Hartree–Fock formalism, but make many approximations and obtain some parameters from empirical data. They are very important in computational chemistry for treating large molecules where the full Hartree–Fock method without the approximations is too expensive. The use of empirical parameters appears to allow some inclusion of electron correlation effects into the methods.
Ab initio quantum chemistry methods are computational chemistry methods based on quantum chemistry. The term ab initio was first used in quantum chemistry by Robert Parr and coworkers, including David Craig in a semiempirical study on the excited states of benzene. The background is described by Parr. Ab initio means "from first principles" or "from the beginning", implying that the only inputs into an ab initio calculation are physical constants. Ab initio quantum chemistry methods attempt to solve the electronic Schrödinger equation given the positions of the nuclei and the number of electrons in order to yield useful information such as electron densities, energies and other properties of the system. The ability to run these calculations has enabled theoretical chemists to solve a range of problems and their importance is highlighted by the awarding of the Nobel prize to John Pople and Walter Kohn.
Car–Parrinello molecular dynamics or CPMD refers to either a method used in molecular dynamics or the computational chemistry software package used to implement this method.
Quantum chemistry composite methods are computational chemistry methods that aim for high accuracy by combining the results of several calculations. They combine methods with a high level of theory and a small basis set with methods that employ lower levels of theory with larger basis sets. They are commonly used to calculate thermodynamic quantities such as enthalpies of formation, atomization energies, ionization energies and electron affinities. They aim for chemical accuracy which is usually defined as within 1 kcal/mol of the experimental value. The first systematic model chemistry of this type with broad applicability was called Gaussian-1 (G1) introduced by John Pople. This was quickly replaced by the Gaussian-2 (G2) which has been used extensively. The Gaussian-3 (G3) was introduced later.
CP2K is a freely available (GPL) quantum chemistry and solid state physics program package, written in Fortran 2008, to perform atomistic simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems. It provides a general framework for different methods: density functional theory (DFT) using a mixed Gaussian and plane waves approach (GPW) via LDA, GGA, MP2, or RPA levels of theory, classical pair and many-body potentials, semi-empirical and tight-binding Hamiltonians, as well as Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM) hybrid schemes relying on the Gaussian Expansion of the Electrostatic Potential (GEEP). The Gaussian and Augmented Plane Waves method (GAPW) as an extension of the GPW method allows for all-electron calculations. CP2K can do simulations of molecular dynamics, metadynamics, Monte Carlo, Ehrenfest dynamics, vibrational analysis, core level spectroscopy, energy minimization, and transition state optimization using NEB or dimer method.
David Matthew Ceperley is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics.
Ascalaph Designer is a computer program for general purpose molecular modelling for molecular design and simulations. It provides a graphical environment for the common programs of quantum and classical molecular modelling ORCA, NWChem, Firefly, CP2K and MDynaMix . The molecular mechanics calculations cover model building, energy optimizations and molecular dynamics. Firefly covers a wide range of quantum chemistry methods. Ascalaph Designer is free and open-source software, released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2).
MADNESS is a high-level software environment for the solution of integral and differential equations in many dimensions using adaptive and fast harmonic analysis methods with guaranteed precision based on multiresolution analysis and separated representations .
BigDFT is a free software package for physicists and chemists, distributed under the GNU General Public License, whose main program allows the total energy, charge density, and electronic structure of systems made of electrons and nuclei to be calculated within density functional theory (DFT), using pseudopotentials, and a wavelet basis.
Klaus Schulten was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to apply theoretical physics to the fields of biomedicine and bioengineering and dynamically model living systems. His mathematical, theoretical, and technological innovations led to key discoveries about the motion of biological cells, sensory processes in vision, animal navigation, light energy harvesting in photosynthesis, and learning in neural networks.
Ali Alavi FRS is a professor of theoretical chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
A Pople diagram or Pople's Diagram is a diagram which describes the relationship between various calculation methods in computational chemistry. It was initially introduced in January 1965 by Sir John Pople,, during the Symposium of Atomic and Molecular Quantum Theory in Florida. The Pople Diagram can be either 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional, with the axes representing ab initio methods, basis sets and treatment of relativity. The diagram attempts to balance calculations by giving all aspects of a computation equal weight.
Quantum crystallography is a branch of crystallography that investigates crystalline materials within the framework of quantum mechanics, with analysis and representation, in position or in momentum space, of quantities like wave function, electron charge and spin density, density matrices and all properties related to them. Like the quantum chemistry, Quantum crystallography involves both experimental and computational work. The theoretical part of quantum crystallography is based on quantum mechanical calculations of atomic/molecular/crystal wave functions, density matrices or density models, used to simulate the electronic structure of a crystalline material. While in quantum chemistry, the experimental works mainly rely on spectroscopy, in quantum crystallography the scattering techniques play the central role, although spectroscopy as well as atomic microscopy are also sources of information.
Mixed quantum-classical (MQC) dynamics is a class of computational theoretical chemistry methods tailored to simulate non-adiabatic (NA) processes in molecular and supramolecular chemistry. Such methods are characterized by:
- Propagation of nuclear dynamics through classical trajectories;
- Propagation of the electrons through quantum methods;
- A feedback algorithm between the electronic and nuclear subsystems to recover nonadiabatic information.
