Performance of TDDFT Vertical Excitation Energies of Core-Substituted Naphthalene Diimides

Ayush K. Narsaria, Julian D. Ruijter, Trevor A. Hamlin, Andreas W. Ehlers, Célia Fonseca Guerra, Koop Lammertsma*, F. Matthias Bickelhaupt*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We have evaluated the performance of various density functionals, covering generalized gradient approximation (GGA), global hybrid (GH) and range-separated hybrid (RSH), using time dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) for computing vertical excitation energies against experimental absorption maximum (λmax) for a set of 10 different core-substituted naphthalene diimides (cNDI) recorded in dichloromethane. The computed excitation in case of GH PBE0 is most accurate while the trend is most systematic with RSH LCY-BLYP compared to λmax. We highlight the importance of including solvent effects for optimal agreement with the λmax. Increasing the basis set size from TZ2P to QZ4P has a negligible influence on the computed excitation energies. Notably, RSH CAMY-B3LYP gave the least error for charge-transfer excitation. The poorest agreement with λmax is obtained with semi-local GGA functionals. Use of the optimally-tuned RSH LCY-BLYP* is not recommended because of the high computational cost and marginal improvement in results.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1448-1455
Number of pages8
JournalJournal of Computational Chemistry
Volume41
Issue number15
Early online date6 Mar 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 5 Jun 2020

Funding

This work is part of the Industrial Partnership Program (IPP) ?Computational Sciences for Energy Research? (project 14CSER011) which is part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). This research program is co-financed by Shell Global Solutions International B.V.

FundersFunder number
Shell Global Solutions International B.V. ‐ Industrial Partnership Program
Shell Global Solutions International
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

    Keywords

    • charge-transfer excitations
    • density functional calculations
    • naphthalene diimides
    • solvent effects
    • time-dependent density functional theory

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