Vibron hopping and bond anharmonicity in hot dense hydrogen

The Raman-active vibron of dense hydrogen has been shown to exhibit unexpected changes as a function of pressure and temperature to above 100 GPa. To understand these results we have performed supercell-based calculations using Van Kranendonk theory taking into account the renormalization of the hopping parameter by the lattice vibrations. We find that the major temperature dependence at this level of theory comes from the differences in populations of rotational states. The theory provides a fair description of the experimental results up to 70 GPa. We examine in detail a number of assumptions made in the application of the Van Kranendonk model to hydrogen as a function of pressure and temperature. We also present results of hybrid path integral molecular dynamics calculations in the fluid state at a low pressure (7 GPa) near the melting temperature. An amorphous-solid model of the fluid predicts that the Raman vibron frequencies change little upon melting, in agreement with experiment. The Van Kranendonk theory with fixed rotational identities of the molecules tends to predict more peaks in the Raman spectrum than are observed experimentally.