Publications by authors named "Lukas N Wirz"

Article Synopsis
  • * Two models of a small molecule, one rigid and one flexible, are used to test the assumptions that internal and rotational motions are decoupled and that the molecule is rigid.
  • * The findings suggest that the rigid model can reproduce the target RDC values, but struggles with orientation distribution, while the flexible model fails to reproduce both target RDC values and orientation distribution, highlighting challenges in studying flexible biomolecules.
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Magnetically induced current densities (MICDs) of Zn-porphyrinoid nanostructures have been studied at the density functional theory level using the B3LYP functional and the def2-SVP basis set. Six of the studied Zn-porphyrinoid nanostructures consist of two crossing porphyrinoid belts, and one is a porphyrinoid nanoball belonging to the octahedral () point group. The Zn-porphyrin units are connected to each other via butadiyne linkers as in a recently synthesized porphyrinoid structure resembling two crossed belts.

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The molecular structures of porphyrinoid cages were obtained by constructing small polyhedral graphs whose vertices have degree-4. The initial structures were then fully optimized at the density functional theory (DFT) level using the generalized gradient approximation. Some of polyhedral vertices were replaced with Zn-porphyrin units and their edges were replaced with ethyne or butadiyne bridges or connected by fusing two neighboring Zn-porphyrin units.

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We propose a novel class of gold-containing molecules, which have been designed using conjugated carbon structures as templates. The sp-hybridized carbons of C moieties are replaced with a gold atom and one of the adjacent carbons is replaced by nitrogen. Applying the procedure to hexadehydro[12]annulene yields the well-known cyclic trinuclear gold(i) carbeniate complex.

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The topology of twisted molecular rings is characterized by the linking number, which is equal to the sum of the twist-a local property of the molecular frame-and the writhe-a global parameter, which represents the bending of the molecular ring. In this work, we investigate a number of cyclic all- trans CH annulenes with varying twisting numbers for a given linking number and their dications. The aromatic character is assessed by calculating ring-current strength susceptibilities using the gauge-including magnetically induced currents (GIMIC) method, which makes it possible to conduct a systematic study of the relation between the topology and aromaticity of twisted molecules.

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The definiteness of the Mulliken and Dirac electron repulsion integral (ERI) matrices is examined for different classes of resolution-of-the-identity (RI) ERI approximations with particular focus on local fitting techniques. For global RI, robust local RI, and nonrobust local RI we discuss the definiteness of the approximated ERI matrices as well as the resulting bounds of Hartree, exchange, and total energies. Lower bounds of Hartree and exchange energy contributions are crucial as their absence may lead to variational instabilities, causing severe convergence problems or even convergence to a spurious state in self-consistent-field optimizations.

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Residual dipolar couplings (RDCs), unlike most other types of NMR observables, provide orientational information, reporting on the alignment of inter-spin vectors (ISVs) relative to the magnetic field. A great challenge in using experimental RDCs to restrain molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is how to represent this alignment. An alignment tensor is often used to parameterise the contribution of molecular alignment to the angular dependence of RDCs.

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A new family of cavernous all-carbon structures is proposed. These molecular cage structures are constructed by edge subdivisions and leapfrog transformations from cubic polyhedra or their duals. The obtained structures were then optimized at the density functional level.

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We introduce a simple but computationally very efficient harmonic force field, which works for all fullerene structures and includes bond stretching, bending, and torsional motions as implemented into our open-source code Fullerene. This gives accurate geometries and reasonably accurate vibrational frequencies with root mean square deviations of up to 0.05 Ã… for bond distances and 45.

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The topology of fullerenes.

Wiley Interdiscip Rev Comput Mol Sci

January 2015

Fullerenes are carbon molecules that form polyhedral cages. Their bond structures are exactly the planar cubic graphs that have only pentagon and hexagon faces. Strikingly, a number of chemical properties of a fullerene can be derived from its graph structure.

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Residual dipolar couplings, chemical shift anisotropies and quadrupolar couplings provide information about the orientation of inter-spin vectors and the anisotropic contribution of the local environment to the chemical shifts of nuclei, respectively. Structural interpretation of these observables requires parameterization of their angular dependence in terms of an alignment tensor. We compare and evaluate two algorithms for generating the optimal alignment tensor for a given molecular structure and set of experimental data, namely SVD (Losonczi et al.

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The structure and properties of the three smallest nonface-spiral (NS) fullerenes NS-T-C₃₈₀, NS-D₃-C₃₈₄, NS-D₃-C₄₄₀, and the first isolated pentagon NS-fullerene, NS-D₃-C₆₇₂, are investigated in detail. They are constructed by either a generalized face-spiral algorithm or by vertex insertions followed by a force-field optimization using the recently introduced program Fullerene. The obtained structures were then further optimized at the density functional level of theory and their stability analyzed with reference to Ih-C₆₀.

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