Modeling intermolecular effects on nonlinear optical properties of transition-metal complexes. An effective core potential study.

An initial effort to study the nonlinear optical (NLO) properties of interacting transition-metal-oxo complexes is presented and studied by effective core potential approaches. Osmium tetroxide is used for this study. Favorable intermolecular interaction effects, even within this weak interaction regime, that yield enhancements in NLO properties have been found. Interaction effects increase alpha (polarizability) up to 6% and gamma (second hyperpolarizability) up to 100% relative to the isolated monomer result for OsO4. The magnitude of the interaction (hyper)polarizabilities, and indeed even the sign, is found to be quite sensitive to the relative orientation of the osmium tetroxide monomers.