Full cLR-PCM calculations of the solvatochromic effects on emission energies

Abstract

We compare the solvatochromic shifts measured experimentally and obtained theoretically for the emission of several substitued fluorophores (indole, benzofurazan, naphthalimide…). Our theoretical protocol relies on time-dependent density functional theory and uses several variations of the polarisable continuum model. In particular, we compare the merits of the linear-response and the corrected linear response approaches, the latter being used for both energetic and structural calculations. It turns out that performing fully-consistent corrected linear response calculations yields the smallest mean signed and absolute errors for the solvatochromic shifts, although optimizing the excited-state structures at the linear-response level only induces limited increase of the average deviations. In contrast, for auxochromic effects, the average errors provided by the two solvation models are very similar.