Simulation of Impulsive Vibrational Spectroscopy

In the present work we applied a fully atomistic electron–nuclear real-time propagation protocol to compute the impulsive vibrational spectroscopy of the five DNA/RNA nucleobases in order to study the very first steps (subpicosecond) of their energy distribution after UV excitation. We observed that after the pump pulse absorption the system is prepared in a coherent superposition of the ground and the pumped electronic excited states in the equilibrium geometry of the ground state. Furthermore, for relatively low fluency values of the pump pulse, the dominant contribution to the electronic wave function of the coherent state is of the ground state and the mean potential energy surface within the Ehrenfest approximation is similar to that of the ground state. As a consequence, the molecular displacements are better correlated with ground-state normal modes. On the other hand, when the pump fluency is increased the excited-state contribution to the electronic wave function becomes more important and the mean potential energy surface resembles more that of the excited state, producing a better correlation between the molecular displacements and the excited-state normal modes. Finally, it has been observed that the impulsive activation of several vibrational modes upon electronic excitation is triggered by the development of excited-state forces which accelerate the nuclei from their equilibrium positions causing a distribution of the absorbed electronic energy on the nuclear degrees of freedom and could be closely related to the driving force of the ultrafast nonradiative deactivation observed in these systems.