Ultrafast Excited-State Energy Transfer in Phenylene Ethynylene Dendrimer: Quantum Dynamics with Tensor Network Method

Abstract: Photo-induced excited-state energy transfer (EET) processes play an important role in the solar energy conversions. The phenylene ethynylene (PE) dendrimers display great potential in improving the efficiency of solar cells, because of their excellent photo-harvesting and exciton-transport properties. In this work, we investigated the intramolecular EET dynamics in a dendrimer composed of two linear PE units (2-ring and 3-ring) using the full quantum dynamics based on the tensor network method. We first constructed a diabatic model Hamiltonian based on the electronic structure calculations. Using this diabatic vibronic coupling model, we tried to obtain the main features of the EET dynamics in terms of the several diabatic models with different numbers of vibrational modes (from 4 modes to 129 modes) and to explore the corresponding vibronic coupling interactions. The results show that the EET in the current PE dendrimer is an ultrafast process. Four modes with A' symmetry play dominant roles in the dynamics, other 86 modes with A' symmetry can damp the electronic coherence, and the modes of A" symmetry do not show the significant influence on the EET process. Overall, the first-order intrastate vibronic coupling terms show the dominant roles in the EET dynamics, while the second-order intrastate vibronic coupling terms give the visible impact here by damping the electronic coherence and slowing down the overall EET process. This work provides a valuable understanding of the physical insight in the EET dynamics of PE dendrimers.