Theoretical characterization of photoinduced electron transfer in rigidly linked donor-acceptor molecules: the fragment charge difference and the generalized Mulliken-Hush schemes

We calculate the electron transfer (ET) rates for a series of heptacyclo[6.6.0.02,6.03,13.014,11.05,9.010,14]-tetradecane (HCTD) linked donor-acceptor molecules. The electronic coupling factor was calculated by the fragment charge difference (FCD) [19] and the generalized Mulliken-Hush (GMH) schemes [20]. We found that the FCD is less prone to problems commonly seen in the GMH scheme, especially when the coupling values are small. For a 3-state case where the charge transfer (CT) state is coupled with two different locally excited (LE) states, we tested with the 3-state approach for the GMH scheme [30], and found that it works well with the FCD scheme. A simplified direct diagonalization based on Rust's 3-state scheme was also proposed and tested. This simplified scheme does not require a manual assignment of the states, and it yields coupling values that are largely similar to those from the full Rust's approach. The overall electron transfer (ET) coupling rates were also calculated.