A series of highly luminescent dinuclear copper(I) complexes has been synthesized in good yields using a modular ligand system of easily accessible diphenylphosphinopyridine-type P^N ligands. Characterization of these complexes via X-ray crystallographic studies and elemental analysis revealed a dinuclear complex structure with a butterfly-shaped metal-halide core. The complexes feature emission covering the visible spectrum from blue to red together with high quantum yields up to 96%. Density functional theory calculations show that the HOMO consists mainly of orbitals of both the metal core and the bridging halides, while the LUMO resides dominantly on the heterocyclic part of the P^N ligands. Therefore, modification of the heterocyclic moiety of the bridging ligand allows for systematic tuning of the luminescence wavelength. By increasing the aromatic system of the N-heterocycle or through functionalization of the pyridyl moiety, complexes with emission maxima from 481 to 713 nm are obtained. For a representative compound, it is shown that the ambient-temperature emission can be assigned as a thermally activated delayed fluorescence, featuring an attractively short emission decay time of only 6.5 μs at ϕPL = 0.8. It is proposed to apply these compounds for singlet harvesting in OLEDs.

We compile a 109-membered benchmark set of adiabatic excitation energies (AEEs) from high-resolution gas-phase experiments. Our data set includes a variety of organic chromophores with up to 46 atoms, radicals, and inorganic transition metal compounds. Many of the 91 molecules in our set are relevant to atmospheric chemistry, photovoltaics, photochemistry, and biology. The set samples valence, Rydberg, and ionic states of various spin multiplicities. As opposed to vertical excitation energies, AEEs are rigorously defined by energy differences of vibronic states, directly observable, and insensitive to errors in equilibrium structures. We supply optimized ground state and excited state structures, which allows fast and convenient evaluation of AEEs with two single-point energy calculations per system. We apply our benchmark set to assess the performance of time-dependent density functional theory using common semilocal functionals and the configuration interaction singles method. Hybrid functionals such as B3LYP and PBE0 yield the best results, with mean absolute errors around 0.3 eV. We also investigate basis set convergence and correlations between different methods and between the magnitude of the excited state relaxation energy and the AEE error. A smaller, 15-membered subset of AEEs is introduced and used to assess the correlated wave function methods CC2 and ADC(2). These methods improve upon hybrid TDDFT for systems with single-reference ground states but perform less well for radicals and small-gap transition metal compounds. None of the investigated methods reaches "chemical accuracy" of 0.05 eV in AEEs.

The Au25(SR)18(-) cluster has been the poster child of success in applying the superatom complex concept and remains the most studied system of all of the monolayer-protected metal clusters. In this Letter, we try to solve a mystery about this cluster: the low-temperature UV-vis absorption spectrum shows double peaks below 2.0 eV while simulation by scalar relativistic time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) shows only one peak in this region. Using a recently implemented two-component TDDFT, we show that spin-orbit coupling (SOC) leads to those two peaks by splitting the 1P superatomic HOMO orbitals. This work highlights the importance of SOC in understanding the electronic structure and optical absorption of thiolated gold nanoclusters, which has not been realized previously.

The functionality of common organic semiconductor materials is determined by their chemical structure and crystal modification. While the former can be fine-tuned via synthesis, a priori control over the crystal structure has remained elusive. We show that the surface tension is the main driver for the plate-like crystallization of a novel small organic molecule n-type semiconductor at the liquid-air interface. This interface provides an ideal environment for the growth of millimeter-sized semiconductor platelets that are only few nanometers thick and thus highly attractive for application in transistors. On the basis of the novel high-performance perylene diimide, we show in as-grown, only 3 nm thin crystals electron mobilities of above 4 cm/(V s) and excellent bias stress stability. We suggest that the established systematics on solvent parameters can provide the basis of a general framework for a more deterministic crystallization of other small molecules.

The study and prediction of chemical reactivity is one of the most important application areas of molecular quantum chemistry. Large-scale, fully error-tolerant quantum computers could provide exact or near-exact solutions to the underlying electronic structure problem with exponentially less effort than a classical computer thus enabling highly accurate predictions for comparably large molecular systems. In the nearer future, however, only "noisy" devices with a limited number of qubits that are subject to decoherence will be available. For such near-term quantum computers the hybrid quantum-classical variational quantum eigensolver algorithm in combination with the unitary coupled-cluster ansatz (UCCSD-VQE) [1,2] has become an intensively discussed approach that could provide accurate results before the dawn of error-tolerant quantum computing. In this work we present an implementation of UCCSD-VQE that allows for the first time to treat both openand closed-shell molecules. We study the accuracy of the obtained energies for nine small molecular systems as well as for four exemplary chemical reactions by comparing to well-established electronic structure methods like (non-unitary) coupled-cluster and density functional theory. Finally, we roughly estimate the required quantum hardware resources to obtain "useful" results for practical purposes.