Electronic structure and optical properties of isolated and TiO2-grafted free base porphyrins for water oxidation: A challenging test case for DFT and TD-DFT

Seven free base porphyrins employed in dye-sensitized photoelectrosynthetic cells are investigated with the aim of benchmarking the ability of different density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT approaches in reproducing their structure, vertical, and E0-0 excitation energies and the energy levels alignment (red-ox properties) at the interface with the TiO2. We find that both vertical and E0-0 excitation energies are accurately reproduced by range-separated functionals, among which the omega B97X-D delivers the lowest absolute deviations from experiments. When the dye/TiO2 interface is modeled, the physical interfacial energetics is only obtained when the B3LYP functional is employed; on the other hand, M06-2X (54% of exchange) and the two long-range corrected approaches tested (CAM-B3LYP and omega B97X-D) excessively destabilize the semiconductor conduction band levels with respect to the dye's lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (LUMOs), predicting no pathway for electron injection. (c) 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.