On Sun, Jul 19, 2020, German P. Barletta wrote:
>
>I know from Case's paper on crambin, and this mailing list, that when
>running this kind of analysis with cpptraj (that is, using the matrix
>mwcovar command), eigenvalues are reported in units of cm^-1. Why is that?
>It's supposed to be a diagonalization of a covariance matrix, so the
>eigenvalues should be in units of distance^2 (say, cm^2). Right? Is Amber
>just taking the inverse square and reporting those values? If so, why? Or
>is there something else I'm missing?
The key is the "mw" (mass-weighted) part: if you just ask to diagonalize
the covariance matrix, you will get what you describe above. We took
a request to do mass-weighting as an indication that one would most
likely be comparing to either normal mode calculations or experimental
vibrational frequencies.
Note that "wavenumbers" (cm^-1) is a conventional unit, giving
1/wavelength for the fundamental vibrational excitation in the harmonic
limit.: This is proportional to energy, and wavenumbers are often treated
as a unit of energy:
E = h*nu = hc/lambda = hc(1/lambda).
They do *not* correspond to just taking the inverse square-root of a
covariance matrix eigenvalue: mass weighting would make the units all
wrong if you tried to do that.
...hope this helps...dac
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Received on Sun Jul 19 2020 - 18:00:02 PDT
