Modeling Optical Spectra of Large Organic Systems Using Real-Time Propagation of Semiempirical Effective Hamiltonians

We present an implementation of a time-dependent semiempirical method (INDO/S) in NWChem using real-time (RT) propagation to address, in principle, the entire spectrum of valence electronic excitations. Adopting this model, we study the UV/vis spectra of medium-sized systems such as P3B2 and f-coronene, and in addition much larger systems such as ubiquitin in the gas phase and the betanin chromophore in the presence of two explicit solvents (water and methanol). RT-INDO/S provides qualitatively and often quantitatively accurate results when compared with RT-TDDFT or experimental spectra. Even though we only consider the INDO/S Hamiltonian in this work, our implementation provides a framework for performing electron dynamics in large systems using semiempirical Hartree-Fock Hamiltonians in general.