Density matrix treatment of non-adiabatic photoinduced electron transfer at a semiconductor surface

Photoinduced electron transfer at a nanostructured surface leads to localized transitions and involves three different types of non-adiabatic couplings: vertical electronic transitions induced by light absorption emission, coupling of electronic states by the momentum of atomic motions, and their coupling due to interactions with electronic density fluctuations and vibrational motions in the substrate. These phenomena are described in a unified way by a reduced density matrix (RDM) satisfying an equation of motion that contains dissipative rates. The RDM treatment is used here to distinguish non-adiabatic phenomena that are localized from those due to interaction with a medium. The fast decay of localized state populations due to electronic density fluctuations in the medium has been treated within the Lindblad formulation of rates. The formulation is developed introducing vibronic states constructed from electron orbitals available from density functional calculations, and from vibrational states describing local atomic displacements. Related ab initio molecular dynamics calculations have provided diabatic momentum couplings between excited electronic states. This has been done in detail for an indirect photoexcitation mechanism of the surface Ag(3)Si(111):H, which leads to long lasting electronic charge separation. The resulting coupled density matrix equations are solved numerically to obtain the population of the final charge-separated state as it changes over time, for several values of the diabatic momentum coupling. New insight and unexpected results are presented here which can be understood in terms of photoinduced non-adiabatic transitions involving many vibronic states. It is found that the population of long lasting charge separation states is larger for smaller momentum coupling, and that their population grows faster for smaller coupling.