The Challenge of Accurate Computation of Two-Photon Absorption Properties of Organic Chromophores in the Condensed Phase

Two strategies are applied to evaluate the effect of the environment on the two-photon absorption (TPA) cross sections for two characteristic excited states of C2H4 upon complexation with H2O. The supermolecular strategy provides the reference complexation-induced shifts and uses either the EOM-CCSD or ADC(2) method. The embedding strategy is based on frozen-density-embedding theory (FDET) and uses only fundamental constants. The TPA cross sections from high-level supermolecular calculations are extremely basis-set-sensitive. Literature data and the present study indicate that accuracy of the absolute TPA cross sections below 100 atomic units and their shifts below 10 atomic units remains a challenge. The obtained FDET results show a similar basis-set behavior. For the largest basis set (d-aug-cc-pVQZ), TPA cross sections obtained from these two strategies are in excellent agreement. The complexation-induced shifts have the correct sign of the effect and a small (12-33%) relative error in magnitude. The deviations of the FDET-derived shifts from the reference are of similar magnitude as the reliability threshold of the reference shifts.