On-the-fly ab intito calculations of anharmonic vibrational frequencies: local-monomer theory and application to HCl clusters.

We present an on-the-fly quantum mechanical method to obtain anharmonic vibrational frequencies for molecular clusters. The basis for the method is the local-monomer model, a "divide and conquer" approach to theoretical spectroscopy, previously applied using full-dimensional surfaces [Y. Wang and J. M. Bowman, J. Chem. Phys. 134, 154510 (2011)]. The model consists of performing a local normal-mode analysis for each monomer in a cluster in the field of the surrounding monomers. Anharmonic vibrational frequencies are then determined for each monomer by numerically solving the Schrödinger equation in terms of the local coordinates using ab initio energies obtained directly. Residual monomer-monomer coupling is accounted for using the Hückel-coupling extension [Y. Wang and J. M. Bowman, J. Chem. Phys. 136, 144113 (2012)]. In addition to the direct local-monomer approach, we propose and demonstrate a composite ab initio technique to reduce computational costs for calculating the anharmonic frequencies of large clusters. This technique utilizes two ab initio methods, a lower level of theory to compute geometries and perform harmonic analyses and a subsequent higher level of theory to compute the energies used in the anharmonic frequency calculations. We demonstrate the on-the-fly approach on hydrogen chloride clusters ranging in size from the dimer to the hexamer. Comparisons of the theoretical frequencies are made to previous experiments. We find the method to be an effective and computationally efficient approach to compute anharmonic frequencies.