The excited states of the phenylene ethynylene dendrimer are investigated comprehensively by various electronic-structure methods. Several computational methods, including SCS-ADC(2), TDHF, TDDFT with different functionals (B3LYP, BH&HLYP, CAM-B3LYP), and DFT/MRCI, are applied in systematic calculations. The theoretical approach based on the one-electron transition density matrix is used to understand the electronic characters of excited states, particularly the contributions of local excitations and charge-transfer excitations within all interacting conjugated branches. Furthermore, the potential energy curves of low-lying electronic states as the functions of ethynylene bonds are constructed at different theoretical levels. This work provides us theoretical insights on the intramolecular excited-state energy transfer mechanism of the dendrimers at the state-of-the-art electronic-structure theories.
Keywords: DFT/MRCI; TDDFT; local excitation and charge-transfer excitation; spin-component scaling modification ADC(2) (SCS-ADC(2)); transition density matrix; tree-like conjugated molecules.
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