Ab initio excited state properties and dynamics of a prototype sigma-bridged-donor-acceptor molecule

The photophysical and dynamical properties of the donor-(sigma-bridge)-acceptor molecule N-phenylpiperindone-malondinitrile are investigated by second-order approximate coupled cluster (CC2) and time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). The study is based on optimized equilibrium geometries for ground and excited states as well as on ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. While CC2 and DFT both predict ground state geometries that are consistent with the crystal structure, equilibrium geometries for the fluorescent charge transfer (CT) state are qualitatively different between CC2 and TDDFT. CC2 reproduces the experimental results for vertical excitations (within 0.3 eV) and provides an orbital assignment of the experimental absorption bands that is supported by experiments. Using CC2, a good agreement is also found for fluorescence energies (within 0.1-0.6 eV). At contrast, CT absorption and fluorescence energies are strongly underestimated by TDDFT using the semi-local functional PBE but improved agreement is found for the hybrid functional PBE0. However, for both functionals, TDDFT fails to predict an equilibrium geometry of the intradonor excited state because of mixing between this state and an artificially low-lying CT state during the optimization. This is an example where the well documented CT failure of TDDFT affects properties of other locally excited states. The minimum of the intradonor locally excited state was therefore only located by the CC2 method. The internal conversion (IC) process from a locally excited donor state to the CT state is simulated by excited state ab initio molecular dynamics based on CC2 and where nonadiabatic transitions are described using the Landau-Zener approximation. We find the IC process to occur a few tens of femtoseconds after excitation. The simulation provides a detailed description of the atomic rearrangements in electron donor and acceptor that drive the interconversion process.