The electronic character of PTCDA thin films in comparison to other perylene-based organic semi-conductors: ab initio-, TD-DFT and semi-empirical computations of the opto-electronic properties of large aggregates

Perylene-based compounds are promising materials for opto-electronic thin film devices but despite intense investigations, important details of their electronic structure are still under debate. For perylene-3,4,9,10-tetracarboxylic dianhydrid (PTCDA), the theoretical models predict a different relative energetic order of Frenkel and Charge Transfer (CT) states. Additionally, while one model indicates strong differences between PTCDA on one hand and other perylene-based compounds on the other, recent ab initio computations indicate electronic properties of all perylene-based compounds to resemble each other. Finally, the models disagree about the amount of mixing between CT and Frenkel states. Definitive answers to these questions are difficult because the approaches use various approximations. Up to date, the ab initio based methods employ rather small model systems and neglect environmental effects. In the present work, we improve our former approach by analyzing the effects of the various simplifications. In more detail, we increase the size of the model systems, include environmental effects and investigate the influence of exciton–phonon couplings on the absorption spectrum. The computations for larger aggregates were performed with the ZINDO/S approach, because benchmark computations show that it provides accurate vertical excitation energies for Frenkel, as well as CT states.