Accurate Ionization Potentials and Electron Affinities of Acceptor Molecules I. Reference Data at the CCSD(T) Complete Basis Set Limit

Accurate description of the electronic structure of organic semiconductors by GW methods

Electronic properties associated with charged excitations, such as the ionization potential (IP), the electron affinity (EA), and the energy level alignment at interfaces, are critical parameters for the performance of organic electronic devices. To computationally design organic semiconductors and functional interfaces with tailored properties for target applications it is necessary to accurately predict these properties from first principles. Many-body perturbation theory is often used for this purpose within the GW approximation, where G is the one particle Green's function and W is the dynamically screened Coulomb interaction. Here, the formalism of GW methods at different levels of self-consistency is briefly introduced and some recent applications to organic semiconductors and interfaces are reviewed.

Ionization Energies and Aqueous Redox Potentials of Organic Molecules: Comparison of DFT, Correlated ab Initio Theory and Pair Natural Orbital Approaches

The calculation of redox potentials involves large energetic terms arising from gas phase ionization energies, thermodynamic contributions, and solvation energies of the reduced and oxidized species. In this work we study the performance of a wide range of wave function and density functional theory methods for the prediction of ionization energies and aqueous one-electron oxidation potentials of a set of 19 organic molecules. Emphasis is placed on evaluating methods that employ the computationally efficient local pair natural orbital (LPNO) approach, as well as several implementations of coupled cluster theory and explicitly correlated F12 methods. The electronic energies are combined with implicit solvation models for the solvation energies. With the exception of MP2 and its variants, which suffer from enormous errors arising at least partially from the poor Hartree-Fock reference, ionization energies can be systematically predicted with average errors below 0.1 eV for most of the correlated wave function based methods studies here, provided basis set extrapolation is performed. LPNO methods are the most efficient way to achieve this type of accuracy. DFT methods show in general larger errors and suffer from inconsistent behavior. The only exception is the M06-2X functional which is found to be competitive with the best LPNO-based approaches for ionization energies. Importantly, the limiting factor for the calculation of accurate redox potentials is the solvation energy. The errors in the predicted solvation energies by all continuum solvation models tested in this work dominate the final computed reduction potential, resulting in average errors typically in excess of 0.3 V and hence obscuring the gains that arise from choosing a more accurate electronic structure method.