Chemical bonding and nonadiabatic electron wavepacket dynamics in densely quasi-degenerate excited electronic state manifold of boron clusters

Abstract

Formation of chemical bonds is theoretically discerned by the presence of static nuclear configuration on a potential energy surface given within the Born–Oppenheimer framework. We here study dynamical chemical bonding for molecules residing in the electronic excited states that are in a densely quasi-degenerate electronic state manifold and thereby keep undergoing extremely frequent nonadiabatic transitions. For this type of the states, the notion of global potential energy surfaces based on the adiabatic representation loses the usual sense. Nonetheless, chemical bonding exists and associated chemical reactions certainly proceed, for which we call chemistry without potential surfaces. As such, we investigate the highly excited states of boron clusters, which have extraordinarily long lifetimes with neither ionization nor dissociation. The dynamical chemical bonds keep rearranging themselves without converging to a static structure, the vivid electron dynamics of which is tracked by means of the nonadiabatic electron wavepacket dynamics theory. To characterize the dynamical bonding theoretically, we propose the notion of hyper-resonance.