Substituent-level Tuning of Frontier Orbital Energy Levels in Phthalocyanine/C60 Donor-Acceptor Charge Transfer Pairs

We have calculated several low-lying Charge Transfer (CT) excited-state energies for four non-covalently bound dyads composed of a sulfonated-ZnPc coupled to C60. Our results show that the di- and tri-sulfonated systems yield a CT state as the lowest-energy excited state in the system. In contrast, an energy re-ordering for the tetra-sulfonated ZnPc system leads to local excitations lying lower in energy than the CT state, displaying a possible deactivation pathway obstructing charge separation. Since several different donor-acceptor relative orientations may co-exist at an organic heterojunction, we compare the energetics of a few low-lying CT states for the end-on geometry of a di-sulfonated system to its co-facial orientation counterpart. The calculated CT excitation energies are larger for the end-on orientation in comparison to the co-facial structure by ~1.5 eV, which results principally from a substantial decrease in exciton binding energy in going from the co-facial to the end-on orientation. Furthermore, changes in relative donor-acceptor orientation have a larger impact on the CT energies than changes in donor-acceptor distance. TDDFT calculations on the various sulfonated ZnPc donor molecules show a significant splitting of the Q-band for only one of the four donor systems. Our present calculations, in line with previous experimental studies, show that the systematic variation of chemical functional groups is a promising avenue for the substituent-level tuning of various physical properties of organic semiconductors.