Dalton is a powerful general-purpose program system for the study of molecular electronic structure at the Hartree–Fock, Kohn–Sham, multiconfigurational self-consistent-field, Møller–Plesset, configuration-interaction, and coupled-cluster levels of theory. Apart from the total energy, a wide variety of molecular properties may be calculated using these electronic-structure models. Molecular gradients and Hessians are available for geometry optimizations, molecular dynamics, and vibrational studies, whereas magnetic resonance and optical activity can be studied in a gauge-origin-invariant manner. Frequency-dependent molecular properties can be calculated using linear, quadratic, and cubic response theory. A large number of singlet and triplet perturbation operators are available for the study of one-, two-, and three-photon processes. Environmental effects may be included using various dielectric-medium and quantum-mechanics/molecular-mechanics models. Large molecules may be studied using linear-scaling and massively parallel algorithms. Dalton is distributed at no cost from http://www.daltonprogram.org for a number of UNIX platforms.

We present the theory and an implementation of the combined quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics/polarizable dielectric continuum (QM/MM/PCM) method. This is a fully polarizable layered model designed for effective inclusion of a medium in a quantum-mechanical calculation. The short-range part of the solvent electrostatic potential is described by an atomistic model while the long-range part of this potential is described by a dielectric continuum. The QM/MM/PCM method has been implemented in combination with QM linear response techniques allowing for the assessment of, e.g., vertical electronic excitation energies and linear dipole-dipole polarizabilities, in all cases using a nonequilibrium formulation of the environmental response. The model is general, but is here implemented for the case of density functional theory. Numerical examples are given for solvatochromic shifts relating to a set of organic molecules in aqueous solution. We find in general the QM/MM/PCM interface to exhibit a faster convergence with respect to the system size as compared to the use of QM/MM only.

We present for the first time a QM/MM study of the one-and two-photon absorption spectra of the GFP chromophore embedded in the full protein environment described by an advanced quantum mechanically derived polarizable force field. The calculations are performed on a crystal structure of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) using the polarizable embedding density functional theory (PE-DFT) scheme. The importance of treating the protein environment explicitly with a polarizable force field and higherorder multipoles is demonstrated, as well as the importance of including water molecules close to the chromophore in the protein barrel. For the most advanced description we achieve good agreement with experimental findings, with a peak at 405 nm for the neutral and a peak at 475 nm for the anionic form of the GFP chromophore. The presence of a dark OPA state, as suggested by other studies to explain the discrepancies between OPA and TPA spectra, is not supported by our calculations.

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