Volume 221, 2020

First-principles quantum simulations of exciton diffusion on a minimal oligothiophene chain at finite temperature

Abstract

High-dimensional multiconfigurational quantum dynamics simulations are carried out at finite temperature to simulate exciton diffusion on an oligothiophene chain, representative of a segment of the poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) polymer. The ab initio parametrized site-based Hamiltonian of Binder et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett., 2018, 120, 227401] is employed to model a 20-site system, including intra-ring and inter-ring high-frequency modes as well as torsional modes which undergo thermal fluctuations induced by an explicit harmonic oscillator bath. The system-bath dynamics is treated within the setting of a stochastic mean-field Schrödinger equation. For the 20-site excitonic system, a total of 20 Frenkel states and 248 modes are propagated using the multi-layer multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree (ML-MCTDH) method. The resulting dynamics can be interpreted in terms of the coherent motion of an exciton–polaron quasi-particle stochastically driven by torsional fluctuations. This dynamics yields a near-linear mean squared displacement (MSD) as a function of time, from which a diffusion coefficient can be deduced which increases with temperature, up to 5.7 × 10−3 cm2 s−1 at T = 300 K.

Graphical abstract: First-principles quantum simulations of exciton diffusion on a minimal oligothiophene chain at finite temperature

Associated articles

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
14 May 2019
Accepted
19 Jun 2019
First published
19 Jun 2019

Faraday Discuss., 2020,221, 406-427

First-principles quantum simulations of exciton diffusion on a minimal oligothiophene chain at finite temperature

R. Binder and I. Burghardt, Faraday Discuss., 2020, 221, 406 DOI: 10.1039/C9FD00066F

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements