Improving the Description of the Optical Properties of Carotenoids by Tuning the Long-Range Corrected Functionals.

In this work we use gap-fitting procedure to tune the long-range corrected functionals and accurately investigate the electronic and optical properties of the five main molecules composing Buriti oil (extracted from Mauritia flexuosa L.) in the framework of density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent (TD) DFT. The characteristic length (1/ω) was observed to be entirely system dependent, though we concluded that its determination is of fundamental importance to rescue geometrical, electronic, and optical properties with accuracy. We demonstrate that our approach of tuning characteristic length for each system resulted in an absorbance spectra in better experimental agreement when compared to the traditional methodology. Therefore, this study indicates that the tuning of the range-separation parameter is crucial to improve the description of the optical properties of conjugated molecules when TDDFT is used. For example, the wavelength of maximum absorption, λmax, for the phytofluene, obtained using B3LYP, is 381 nm, while using the gap-fitting procedure for the tuned-LC-BLYP the estimated λmax changed to 358 nm. The latter estimate is in better agreement with the experimental value of 350 nm.

Investigation of the torsional barrier of EDOT using molecular mechanics and DFT methods.

When heterocyclic monomers are polymerized by electrochemical or chemical methods, they form fully conjugated polymers which have a wide range of applications due to their outstanding electronic properties. Among this class of compounds, thiophene derivatives are widely used due to their chemical stability and synthesis flexibility. With the goal to investigate the torsion barrier of polymer chains, a few units of 3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) were chosen and submitted to molecular mechanics (MM), density functional theory (DFT) and coupled cluster CCSD(T) calculations. This study helps to understand the performance and transferability of force fields used in molecular mechanics and molecular dynamics simulations often used to describe structure-property relationships of those systems. Determination of inter-ring torsion angle was performed in a comparative study using both force field, DFT and CCSD(T) methods. A good agreement was noticed between MM and QC results and highlights the importance of the description of the interactions involving the oxygen atoms present in the structure of EDOT. These observations are related to the α,α-coupling that occurs between the monomer units and yields a linear polymer. DFT HOMO and LUMO orbitals were also presented. Finally, UV-vis spectra of EDOT units were obtained using several levels of theory by means of time-dependent DFT calculations (TD-DFT).