Ultrafast estimation of electronic couplings for electron transfer between pi-conjugated organic molecules. II

The development of highly efficient methods for the calculation of electronic coupling matrix elements between the electron donor and acceptor is an important goal in theoretical organic semiconductor research. In Paper I [F. Gajdos, S. Valner, F. Hoffmann, J. Spencer, M. Breuer, A. Kubas, M. Dupuis, and J. Blumberger, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 10, 4653 (2014)], we introduced the analytic overlap method (AOM) for this purpose, which is an ultrafast electronic coupling estimator parameterized to and orders of magnitude faster than density functional theory (DFT) calculations at a reasonably small loss in accuracy. In this work, we reparameterize and extend the AOM to molecules containing nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, and sulfur heteroatoms using 921 dimer configurations from the recently introduced HAB79 dataset. We find again a very good linear correlation between the frontier orbital overlap, calculated ultrafast in an optimized minimum Slater basis, and DFT reference electronic couplings. The new parameterization scheme is shown to be transferable to sulfur-containing polyaromatic hydrocarbons in experimentally resolved dimeric configurations. Our extension of the AOM enables high-throughput screening of very large databases of chemically diverse organic crystal structures and the application of computationally intense non-adiabatic molecular dynamics methods to charge transport in state-of-the-art organic semiconductors, e.g., non-fullerene acceptors. (c) 2021 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

The development of highly efficient methods for calculating electronic coupling matrix elements in theoretical organic semiconductor research is important. By reparameterizing and extending the analytic overlap method (AOM), researchers were able to apply it to molecules containing nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, and sulfur heteroatoms, enabling high-throughput screening of chemically diverse organic crystal structures. The extension of AOM allows for the application of computationally intense non-adiabatic molecular dynamics methods in the study of state-of-the-art organic semiconductors.