Resonant lifetime of core-excited organic adsorbates from first principles

The development of efficient organic electronic devices depends substantially on the electronic coupling of the molecules at interfaces and on their arrangement at the nanometer length-scale. As an example, \u3c0-conjugated electronic systems maximize their coupling to a contact when they adsorb flat. An effective molecule-substrate interaction is mandatory for solar cells where excited electrons should be collected before recombination. Core electron spectroscopies are possibly the most suitable experimental technique to access fast electron transfer times, but introduce significant perturbation on the valence orbitals by the presence of core holes and bound excitons, further calling for theoretical analysis. By first-principles simulations we investigate the resonant electron-transfer lifetime from the excited state of an organic adsorbate to a semiconductor surface, namely isonicotinic acid on rutile TiO2(110). The molecule-substrate interaction is described using density functional theory, while the effect of a truly semi-infinite substrate is taken into account by Green's function techniques. Excitonic effects due to the presence of core-excited atoms in the molecule are shown to be instrumental to understand the electron-transfer times measured using the so-called core-hole-clock technique. In particular, for the isonicotinic acid on TiO2(110), we find that the charge injection from the LUMO is quenched since this state lies within the substrate band gap. We compute the resonant charge-transfer times from LUMO+1 and LUMO+2, and systematically investigate the dependence of the elastic lifetimes of these states on the alignment among adsorbate and substrate states. [1] References [1] G. Fratesi, C. Motta, M. I. Trioni, G. P. Brivio, and D. S\ue0nchez-Port\ue0l, J. Phys. Chem. C (2014) 10.1021/jp500520