Large nonadiabatic quantum molecular dynamics simulations on parallel computers

Abstract

We have implemented a quantum molecular dynamics simulation incorporating nonadiabatic electronic transitions on massively parallel computers to study photoexcitation dynamics of electrons and ions. The nonadiabatic quantum molecular dynamics (NAQMD) simulation is based on Casida’s linear response time-dependent density functional theory to describe electronic excited states and Tully’s fewest-switches surface hopping approach to describe nonadiabatic electron–ion dynamics. To enable large NAQMD simulations, a series of techniques are employed for efficiently calculating long-range exact exchange correction and excited-state forces. The simulation program is parallelized using hybrid spatial and band decomposition, and is tested for various materials.