The character of an electronically excited state is one of the most important descriptors employed to discuss the photophysics and photochemistry of transition metal complexes. In transition metal complexes, the interaction between the metal and the di erent ligands gives rise to a rich variety of excited states, including metal-centered, intra-ligand, metal-to-ligand charge transfer, ligand-to-metal charge transfer, and ligand-to-ligand charge transfer states. Most often, these excited states are identi ed by considering the most important wave function excitation coe cients and inspecting visually the involved orbitals. This procedure is tedious, subjective, and imprecise. Instead, automatic and quantitative techniques for excited-state characterization are desirable. In this contribution we review the concept of charge transfer numbers-as implemented in the TheoDORE package-and show its wide applicability to characterize the excited states of transition metal complexes. Charge transfer numbers are a formal way to analyze an excited state in terms of electron transitions between groups of atoms based only on the well-de ned transition density matrix. Its advantages are many: it can be fully automatized for many excited states, is objective and reproducible, and provides quantitative data useful for the discussion of trends or patterns. We also introduce a formalism for spin-orbit-mixed states and a method for statistical analysis of charge transfer numbers. The potential of this technique is demonstrated for a number of prototypical transition metal complexes containing Ir, Ru, and Re. Topics discussed include orbital delocalization between metal and carbonyl ligands, nonradiative decay through metal-centered states, e ect of spin-orbit couplings on state character, and comparison among results obtained from di erent electronic structure methods.

The ultrafast luminescent decay of [Re(CO)(phen)(im)], representative of Re(I) carbonyl α-diimine photosensitizers, is investigated by means of wavepacket propagations based on the multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree (MCTDH) method. On the basis of electronic structure data obtained at the time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) level, the luminescence decay is simulated by solving a 14 electronic states multimode problem including both vibronic and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) up to 15 vibrational modes. A careful analysis of the results provides the key features of the mechanism of the intersystem crossing (ISC) in this complex. The intermediate state, detected by means of fs - ps time-resolved spectroscopies, is assigned to the T state corresponding to the triplet intraligand (IL) transition localized on the phen ligand. By switching off/on SOC and vibronic coupling in the model it is shown that efficient population transfer occurs from the optically active metal-to-ligand-charge-transfer1,3MLCT states to T and to the lowest long-lived phosphorescent MLCT (T) state. The early ultrafast SOC-driven decay followed by a T/T equilibration controlled by vibronic coupling underlies the photoluminescent properties of [Re(CO)(phen)(im)]. The impact of the axial and N,N ligands on the photophysics of this class of Re(I) complexes is further rationalized on the basis of their calculated optical properties. The relative position of the IL and upperMLCT states with respect to the optically active singlet state is influenced by the N,N ligand and affects the relaxation dynamics.

The reliability of different parameters in the surface hopping method is assessed for a vibronic coupling model of a challenging transition metal complex, where a large number of electronic states of different multiplicities are met within a small energy range. In particular, the effect of two decoherence correction schemes and of various strategies for momentum rescaling and treating frustrating hops during the dynamics is investigated and compared against an accurate quantum dynamics simulation. The results show that surface hopping is generally able to reproduce the reference but also that small differences in the protocol used can strongly affect the results. We find a clear preference for momentum rescaling along only one degree of freedom, using either the nonadiabatic coupling or the gradient difference vector, and trace this effect back to an enhanced number of frustrated hops. Furthermore, reflection of the momentum after frustrated hops is shown to work better than to ignore the process completely. The study also highlights the importance of the decoherence correction but neither of the two methods employed, en-ergy based decoherence or augmented fewest switches surface hopping, performs completely satisfactory and we trace this effect back to a lack of size-consistency. Finally, the effect of different methods for analysing the populations is highlighted. More generally, the study emphasises the importance of the often neglected parameters in surface hopping and shows that there is still need for simple, robust, and generally applicable correction schemes.

The DFT + U methodology is regarded as one of the most-promising strategies to treat the solid state of molecular materials, as it may provide good energetic accuracy at a moderate computational cost. However, a careful parametrization of the U-term is mandatory since the results may be dramatically affected by the selected value. Herein, we benchmarked the Hubbard-like U-term for seven Fe(ii)N6-based pseudo-octahedral spin crossover (SCO) compounds, using as a reference an estimation of the electronic enthalpy difference (ΔHelec) extracted from experimental data (T1/2, ΔS and ΔH). The parametrized U-value obtained for each of those seven compounds ranges from 2.37 eV to 2.97 eV, with an average value of U = 2.65 eV. Interestingly, we have found that this average value can be taken as a good starting point since it leads to an unprecedented mean absolute error (MAE) of only 4.3 kJ mol(-1) in the evaluation of ΔHelec for the studied compounds. Moreover, by comparing our results on the solid state and the gas phase of the materials, we quantify the influence of the intermolecular interactions on the relative stability of the HS and LS states, with an average effect of ca. 5 kJ mol(-1), whose sign cannot be generalized. Overall, the findings reported in this manuscript pave the way for future studies devoted to understand the crystalline phase of SCO compounds, or the adsorption of individual molecules on organic or metallic surfaces, in which the rational incorporation of the U-term within DFT + U yields the required energetic accuracy that is dramatically missing when using bare-DFT functionals.

The low-lying electronic excited states of [Re(imidazole)(CO)3 (phen)](+) (phen = 1,10-phenanthroline) ranging between 420 nm and 330 nm have been calculated by means of relativistic spin-orbit time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) and wavefunction approaches (state-average-CASSCF/CASPT2). A direct comparison between the theoretical absorption spectra obtained with different methods including SOC and solvent corrections for water points to the difficulties at describing on the same footing the bands generated by metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT), intraligand (IL) transition, and ligand-to-Ligand- charge transfer (LLCT). While TD-DFT and three-roots-state-average CASSCF (10,10) reproduce rather well the lowest broad MLCT band observed in the experimental spectrum between 420 nm and 330 nm, more flexible wavefunctions enlarged either by the number of roots or by the number of active orbitals and electrons destabilize the MLCT states by introducing IL and LLCT character in the lowest part of the absorption spectrum. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly versatile materials owing to their vast structural and chemical tunability. These hybrid inorganic-organic crystalline materials offer an ideal platform to incorporate light-harvesting and catalytic centers and thus, exhibit a great potential to be exploited in solar-driven photocatalytic processes such as H 2 production and CO 2 reduction. To be photocatalytically active, UV-visible optical absorption and appropriate band alignment with respect to the target redox potential is required. Despite fulfilling these criteria, the photocatalytic performance of MOFs is still limited by their ability to produce long-lived electron-hole pairs and long-range charge transport. Here, a computational strategy is presented to address these two descriptors in MOFs and to translate them into charge transfer numbers and effective mass values. The approach is applied to 15 MOFs from the literature that encompass the main strategies used in the design of efficient photocatalysts including different metals, ligands, and topologies. The results capture the main characteristics previously reported for these MOFs and enable to identify promising candidates. In the quest of novel photocatalytic systems, high-throughput screening based on charge separation and charge mobility features are envisioned to be applied in large databases of both experimentally and in silico generated MOFs.

We present a quantum-chemical investigation of the excited states of the complex [Re(CO)(Im)(Phen)] (Im = imidazole; Phen = 1,10-phenanthroline) in solution including spin-orbit couplings and vibrational sampling. To this aim, we implemented electrostatic embedding quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) in the Amsterdam Density Functional program suite, suitable for time-dependent density functional calculations including spin-orbit couplings. The new implementation is employed to simulate the absorption spectrum of the complex, which is compared to the results of implicit continuum solvation and frozen-density embedding. Molecular dynamics simulations are used to sample the ground state conformations in solution. The results demonstrate that any study of the excited states of [Re(CO)(Im)(Phen)] in solution and their dynamics should include extensive sampling of vibrational motion and spin-orbit couplings.

Singlet Fission (SF) has demonstrated significant promise for boosting the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of solar cells. Traditionally, SF is targeted as an intermolecular process, however its dependence on crystal packing makes molecular design difficult. In contrast, intramolecular SF (iSF) enables the exploration of tunable bi-chromophoric systems following well-defined structure-property relationships. In this work, we propose a set of parameters to screen conjugated donor-acceptor copolymer candidates with potential iSF behaviour. We focus our analysis on the E(S 1)>2E(T 1) thermodynamic condition and on the appropriate charge transfer (CT) character of S 1. We map the CT character with respect to the frontier molecular orbital (FMO) energies of the constituent monomers, providing a cost-effective protocol for an accelerated screening of promising iSF donor-acceptor pairs, while minimizing the number of computations. These parameters are applied to a chemically diverse, curated library of 81 truncated dimers of synthetically feasible donor-acceptor copolymers. From our dataset, four candidates are flagged for iSF, two of which were previously experimentally reported. This protocol is envisioned to be scaled up for the high-throughput screening of large databases of donor-acceptor dimers for the design and identification of conjugated polymers capable of iSF. File list (2) download file view on ChemRxiv Main_Text.pdf (1.29 MiB) download file view on ChemRxiv ESI.pdf (6.63 MiB)