The performance of Gaussian basis sets for density functional theory-based calculations of core-electron spectroscopies is assessed. The convergence of core-electron binding energies and core-excitation energies using a range of basis sets including split-valence, correlation-consistent, polarisation-consistent and individual gauge for localised orbitals basis sets is studied. For self-consistent field calculations of core-electron binding energies and core-excitation energies of first-row elements, relatively small basis sets can accurately reproduce the values of much larger basis sets, with the IGLO basis sets performing particularly well. Calculations for the K-edge of second-row elements are more challenging, and of the smaller basis sets, pcSseg-2 has the best performance. For the correlation-consistent basis sets, inclusion of core-valence correlation functions is important, with the cc-pCVTZ basis set giving accurate results. Time-dependent density functional theory-based calculations of core-excitation energies show less sensitivity to the basis set with relatively small basis sets, such as pcSseg-1 or pcSseg-2, reproducing the values for much larger basis sets accurately. In contrast, time-dependent density functional theory calculations of X-ray emission energies are highly dependent on the basis set, but the IGLO-II, IGLO-III and pcSseg-2 basis sets provide a good level of accuracy.

Quantum dynamics simulations are used to simulate the ultrafast X-ray Absorption Near-Edge Structure (XANES) spectra of photoexcited pyrazine including two strongly coupled electronically excited states and four normal mode degrees of freedom.

Resonant inelastic soft X-ray scattering maps for the water molecule are simulated by combining quantum chemical calculations of X-ray spectroscopy with ab initio molecular dynamics. The resonant inelastic scattering intensity is computed using the Kramers-Heisenberg formalism, which accounts for channel interference and polarization anisotropy. Algebraic diagrammatic construction and density functional theory-based approaches for the calculation of the X-ray transition energies and transition dipole moments of the absorption and emission processes are explored. Conformational sampling of both ground and core-excited intermediate states allows the effects of ultrafast dynamics on the computed maps to be studied. Overall, it is shown how resonant inelastic scattering maps can be simulated with a computationally efficient protocol that can be extended to investigate larger systems.

Self-consistent field methods for excited states offer an attractive low-cost route to study not only excitation energies but also properties of excited states. Here, we present the generalization of two selfconsistent field methods, the maximum overlap method (MOM) and the σ-SCF method, to calculate excited states in strong magnetic fields and investigate their stability and accuracy in this context. These methods use different strategies to overcome the well-known variational collapse of energybased optimizations to the lowest solution of a given symmetry. The MOM tackles this problem in the definition of the orbital occupations to constrain the self-consistent field procedure to converge on excited states, while the σ-SCF method is based on the minimization of the variance instead of the energy. To overcome the high computational cost of the variance minimization, we present a new implementation of the σ-SCF method with the resolution of identity approximation, allowing the use of large basis sets, which is an important requirement for calculations in strong magnetic fields. The accuracy of these methods is assessed by comparison with the benchmark literature data for He, H 2 , and CH + . The results reveal severe limitations of the variance-based scheme, which become more acute in large basis sets. In particular, many states are not accessible using variance optimization. Detailed analysis shows that this is a general feature of variance optimization approaches due to the masking of local minima in the optimization. In contrast, the MOM shows promising performance for computing excited states under these conditions, yielding results consistent with available benchmark data for a diverse range of electronic states.