Acceleration of Relativistic Electron Dynamics by Means of X2C Transformation: Application to the Calculation of Nonlinear Optical Properties

Abstract

The Liouville-von Neumann equation based on the four-component matrix Dirac-Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian is transformed to a quasirelativistic exact two-component (X2C) form and then used to solve the time evolution of the electronic states only. By this means, a significant acceleration by a factor of 7 or more has been achieved. The transformation of the original four-component equation of motion is formulated entirely in matrix algebra, following closely the X2C decoupling procedure of Ilias and Saue [ J. Chem. Phys. 2007 , 126 , 064102 ] proposed earlier for a static (time-independent) case. In a dynamic (time-dependent) regime, however, an adiabatic approximation must in addition be introduced in order to preserve the block-diagonal form of the time-dependent Dirac-Fock operator during the time evolution. The resulting X2C Liouville-von Neumann electron dynamics (X2C-LvNED) is easy to implement as it does not require an explicit form of the picture-change transformed operators responsible for the (higher-order) relativistic corrections and/or interactions with external fields. To illustrate the accuracy and performance of the method, numerical results and computational timings for nonlinear optical properties are presented. All of the time domain X2C-LvNED results show excellent agreement with the reference four-component calculations as well as with the results obtained from frequency domain response theory.