DFT/TDDFT study on the electronic structure and spectral properties in annulated analogue of phenyl heteroazulene derivative

Paper reports the DFT/TDDFT study on the electronic structure and spectral properties of the seven-membered annulated heteroazulene derivative 6-phenyl-6H-5,6,7-triazadibenzo[f,h]naphtho[3,2,1-cd]azulene (PTNA) by means of polarizable continuum model (PCM) and Lippert–Mataga–Onsager reaction field (LM-ORF) model at the B3LYP/6-31+G(d,p) level of theory. The results of calculations are compared with the measured optical absorption and fluorescence spectra as well as with the cyclic voltammetry data. The DFT/TDDFT methods exhibit rather good quantitative agreement regarding the spectral position of the first absorption band; the discrepancy between the experiment and theory is less than 0.1 eV. As for the fluorescence emission the TDDFT calculations underestimate the transition energy of about 0.45 eV. The discrepancy should be attributed to insufficient accuracy of the TDDFT optimization in the excited state. In the polar solvent environment, all the TDDFT/PCM approaches give the bathochromic (red) shift for the fluorescence emission and the hypsochromic (blue) shift for the optical absorption in accordance with the experimental observation. As for the fluorescence emission fairly good agreement with the experiment provides the hybrid approach being the combination of the TDDFT/PCM optimization with the semiempirical electronic structure calculations by PM3 method and solvation LM-ORF model predicting the emission energy in different solvents with the accuracy better than 0.06 eV.

► Cyclic voltammetry study of heteroazulene derivative PTNA.
► DFT/TDDFT/PCM calculations of molecular geometry and electronic states in PTNA.
► TDDFT/PCM calculations of the absorption and fluorescence spectra in PTNA.
► Comparison between TDDFT/PCM calculated and measured optical spectra.