Advances in theory and algorithms for electronic structure calculations must be incorporated into program packages to enable them to become routinely used by the broader chemical community. This work reviews advances made over the past five years or so that constitute the major improvements contained in a new release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry package, together with illustrative timings and applications. Specific developments discussed include fast methods for density functional theory calculations, linear scaling evaluation of energies, NMR chemical shifts and electric properties, fast auxiliary basis function methods for correlated energies and gradients, equation-of-motion coupled cluster methods for ground and excited states, geminal wavefunctions, embedding methods and techniques for exploring potential energy surfaces.

The air-water interface is perhaps the most common liquid interface. It covers more than 70 per cent of the Earth's surface and strongly affects atmospheric, aerosol and environmental chemistry. The air-water interface has also attracted much interest as a model system that allows rigorous tests of theory, with one fundamental question being just how thin it is. Theoretical studies have suggested a surprisingly short 'healing length' of about 3 ångströms (1 Å = 0.1 nm), with the bulk-phase properties of water recovered within the top few monolayers. However, direct experimental evidence has been elusive owing to the difficulty of depth-profiling the liquid surface on the ångström scale. Most physical, chemical and biological properties of water, such as viscosity, solvation, wetting and the hydrophobic effect, are determined by its hydrogen-bond network. This can be probed by observing the lineshape of the OH-stretch mode, the frequency shift of which is related to the hydrogen-bond strength. Here we report a combined experimental and theoretical study of the air-water interface using surface-selective heterodyne-detected vibrational sum frequency spectroscopy to focus on the 'free OD' transition found only in the topmost water layer. By using deuterated water and isotopic dilution to reveal the vibrational coupling mechanism, we find that the free OD stretch is affected only by intramolecular coupling to the stretching of the other OD group on the same molecule. The other OD stretch frequency indicates the strength of one of the first hydrogen bonds encountered at the surface; this is the donor hydrogen bond of the water molecule straddling the interface, which we find to be only slightly weaker than bulk-phase water hydrogen bonds. We infer from this observation a remarkably fast onset of bulk-phase behaviour on crossing from the air into the water phase.

In this work, we combine atomistic molecular dynamics simulations with theoretical vibrational spectroscopy to study the properties of water confined inside bis(2-ethylhexyl)sulfosuccinate (AOT) reverse micelles. This approach is found to successfully reproduce the experimental spectra, rotational anisotropy decays, and spectral diffusion time-correlation functions as a function of micelle size. These results are interpreted in terms of water molecules in different hydrogen bonding environments. One interesting result from our simulation, not directly accessible experimentally, involves the distance from the surfactant headgroup/water interface over which the dynamical properties of water become bulk-like. We find that this distance varies with micelle size, casting doubt on the core/shell model. In particular, the distance increases with decreasing micelle size, and hence decreasing radius of curvature of the interface. We suggest that this arises from curvature-induced frustration. We also find that the dynamics in the smallest micelle studied is extremely slow--relaxation is still incomplete by 1 ns. As in other glassy systems with collective relaxation, our time-correlation functions can be fit to stretched exponentials, in this case with very small exponents.

We propose a novel interpretation of the water liquid-vapor interface vibrational sum-frequency (VSF) spectrum in terms of hydrogen-bonding classes. Unlike an absorption spectrum, the VSF signal can be considered as a sum of signed contributions from different hydrogen-bonded species in the sample. We show that the recently observed positive feature at low frequency, in the imaginary part of the signal, is a result of cancellation between the positive contributions from four-hydrogen-bonded molecules and negative contributions from those molecules with one or two broken hydrogen bonds. Spectral densities for each of these subgroups span the entire relevant spectral range. Three-body interactions within our newly developed E3B water simulation model prove to be critical in describing the proper balance between different hydrogen-bonded species, as (two-body) SPC/E, TIP4P, and TIP4P/2005 models fail to reproduce the positive feature. The results clarify the molecular origin of the VSF signal, and highlight the importance of many-body interactions for water in heterogeneous situations.