First-principles calculations of magnetic circular dichroism spectra

An elaborate approach for the prediction of magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) spectra in the framework of highly correlated multiconfigurational ab initio methods is presented. The MCD transitions are computed by the explicit treatment of spin-orbit coupled (SOC) and spin-spin coupled (SSC) N-electron states. These states are obtained from the diagonalization of the SOC and SSC operators along with the spin and orbital Zeeman operators in the basis of a preselected number of roots of the spin-free Hamiltonian. Therefore, zero-field splittings due to the SOC and SSC interactions along with the magnetic field splittings are explicitly accounted for in the ground as well as the excited states. This makes it possible to calculate simultaneously all MCD A, B, and C terms even beyond the linear response limit. The SOC is computed using a multicenter mean-field approximation to the Breit-Pauli Hamiltonian. Two-electron SSC terms are included in the treatment without further approximations. The MCD transition intensities are subjected to numerical orientational averaging in order to treat the most commonly encountered case of randomly oriented molecules. The simulated MCD spectra for the OH, NH, and CH radicals as well as for [Fe(CN)(6)](3-) are in good agreement with the experimental spectra. In the former case, the significant effects of the inert gas matrices in which the experimental spectra were obtained were modeled in a phenomenological way.