Assessment of the ΔSCF-DFT approach for electronic excitations in organic dyes

This paper assesses the accuracy of the ΔSCF method for computing low-lying HOMO→LUMO transitions in organic dye molecules. For a test set of vertical excitation energies of 16 chromophores, surprisingly similar accuracy is observed for time-dependent density functional theory and for ΔSCF density f...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kowalczyk, Timothy Daniel, Yost, Shane Robert, Van Voorhis, Troy
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Institute of Physics 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70060
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7111-0176
Description
Summary:This paper assesses the accuracy of the ΔSCF method for computing low-lying HOMO→LUMO transitions in organic dye molecules. For a test set of vertical excitation energies of 16 chromophores, surprisingly similar accuracy is observed for time-dependent density functional theory and for ΔSCF density functional theory. In light of this performance, we reconsider the ad hoc ΔSCF prescription and demonstrate that it formally obtains the exact stationary density within the adiabatic approximation, partially justifying its use. The relative merits and future prospects of ΔSCF for simulating individual excited states are discussed.