Connections and performances of Green's function methods for charged and neutral excitations

Abstract: In recent years, Green's function methods have garnered considerable interest due to their ability to target both charged and neutral excitations. Among them, the well-established $GW$ approximation provides accurate ionization potentials and electron affinities and can be extended to neutral excitations using the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) formalism. Here, we investigate the connections between various Green's function methods and evaluate their performance for charged and neutral excitations. Comparisons with other widely-known second-order wave function methods are also reported. Additionally, we calculate the singlet-triplet gap of cycl[3,3,3]azine, a model molecular emitter for thermally activated delayed fluorescence, which has the particularity of having an inverted gap thanks to a substantial contribution from the double excitations. We demonstrate that, within the $GW$ approximation, a second-order BSE kernel with dynamical correction is required to predict this distinctive characteristic.