Infrared (IR) and Raman spectra are two very valuable tools for the characterization of chemical compounds. And although there seem to be many different possibilities to produce them computationally, I didn’t find any clear tutorial on how to produce them using free software tools. Some of them, give complicated instructions on how to calculate second derivatives or Raman tensors, or stuff like that, but in the end one wonders: Where are the numbers I have to plot!
…Thereby, here is my post about computing IR and Raman spectra with Quantum Espresso.
For the impatient: most of this post is resumed in my Quantum Espresso example for the PHonon code, which will run for some 15-17 minutes and pop-up the IR/Raman spectra of CO2 and ZnO (Wurtzite).