To understand the functional mechanisms of biological macromolecular systems, investigations of both the three-dimensional geometric and electronic structures are important. Accordingly, quantum mechanical (QM) calculations are essential to obtain the properties relevant to the electronic structures of the macromolecular systems. However, because of the high computational costs, only a few hund...

A novel method to combine quantum mechanics (QM) and molecular mechanics has been developed to accurately and efficiently account for covalent bond breaking in polymer systems under high strain without the use of predetermined break locations. Use of this method will provide a better fundamental understanding of the mechano-chemical origins of fracture in thermosets. Since classical force field...

We present an application of the linear scaling frozen density embedding (FDE) formulation of subsystem DFT to the calculation of isotropic hyperfine coupling constants (hfcc's) of atoms belonging to a guanine radical cation embedded in a guanine hydrochloride monohydrate crystal. The model systems range from an isolated guanine to a 15,000 atom QM/MM cluster where the QM region is comprised of...

Normal mode analysis (NMA) is a well-known technique which estimates the intrinsic frequencies of chemical systems by assuming a harmonic shape for the potential energy surface. Despite its simplicity, it is still a popular approach to predict vibrational IR and Raman spectra, to identify chemical groups [1], or to study the large motions involved in conformational changes of biomolecules [2]. ...

Conspectus The desire to study molecular systems that are much larger than what the current state-of-the-art ab initio or density functional theory methods could handle has naturally led to the development of novel approximate methods, including semiempirical approaches, reduced-scaling methods, and fragmentation methods. The major computational limitation of ab initio methods is the scaling pr...

Quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) models are an appealing method for performing zeolite simulations. In QM/MM, a small cluster chosen to encompass the active center is described by QM, while the rest of the zeolite is described by MM. In the present study, we demonstrate that the charges and Lennard-Jones parameters on Si and O must be chosen properly for QM/MM calculations of adsor...

The hybrid quantum mechanics (QM) and molecular mechanics (MM) method is employed to simulate the His-tagged peptide adsorption to ionized region of nickel surface. Based on the previous experiments, the peptide interaction with one Ni ion is considered. In the QM/MM calculation, the imidazoles on the side chain of the peptide and the metal ion with several neighboring water molecules are treat...

Quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) free energy calculation presents a significant challenge due to an excessive number of QM calculations. A useful approach for reducing the computational cost is that based on the mean field approximation to the QM subsystem. Here, we describe such a mean-field QM/MM theory for electronically polarizable systems by starting from the Hartree product...

We describe a procedure for the generation of chemically accurate computer-simulation models to study chemical reactions in the condensed phase. The process involves (i) the use of a coupled semiempirical quantum and classical molecular mechanics method to represent solutes and solvent, respectively; (ii) the optimization of semiempirical quantum mechanics (QM) parameters to produce a computati...