Issue 14, 2018

Fragment-orbital tunneling currents and electronic couplings for analysis of molecular charge-transfer systems

Abstract

In theoretical charge-transfer research, calculation of the electronic coupling element is crucial for examining the degree of the electronic donor–acceptor interaction. The tunneling current (TC), representing the magnitudes and directions of electron flow, provides a way of evaluating electronic couplings, along with the ability of visualizing how electrons flow in systems. Here, we applied the TC theory to π-conjugated organic dimer systems, in the form of our fragment-orbital tunneling current (FOTC) method, which uses the frontier molecular-orbitals of system fragments as diabatic states. For a comprehensive test of FOTC, we assessed how reasonable the computed electronic couplings and the corresponding TC densities are for the hole- and electron-transfer databases HAB11 and HAB7. FOTC gave 12.5% mean relative unsigned error with regard to the high-level ab initio reference. The shown performance is comparable with that of fragment-orbital density functional theory, which gave the same error by 20.6% or 13.9% depending on the formulation. In the test of a set of nucleobase π stacks, we showed that the original TC expression is also applicable to nondegenerate cases under the condition that the overlap between the charge distributions of diabatic states is small enough to offset the energy difference. Lastly, we carried out visual analysis on the FOTC densities of thiophene dimers with different intermolecular alignments. The result depicts an intimate topological connection between the system geometry and electron flow. Our work provides quantitative and qualitative grounds for FOTC, showing it to be a versatile tool in characterization of molecular charge-transfer systems.

Graphical abstract: Fragment-orbital tunneling currents and electronic couplings for analysis of molecular charge-transfer systems

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
12 Jan 2018
Accepted
02 Mar 2018
First published
02 Mar 2018

Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2018,20, 9146-9156

Fragment-orbital tunneling currents and electronic couplings for analysis of molecular charge-transfer systems

S. Hwang, J. Kim and W. Y. Kim, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2018, 20, 9146 DOI: 10.1039/C8CP00266E

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements