Molecular Descriptors of Excited-State Property for High-Throughput Screening of Organic Photofunctional Materials

The excited-state property determines the occurrence of photofunctions in organic materials. We have developed a fragment frontier molecular orbital model for the donor–acceptor-type (D-A-type) systems and constructed molecular descriptors of the excited-state property with charge transfer (CT) or local excitation (LE) based on the orbital information on constituent D and A fragments. Applying these descriptors, we rapidly screened 1CT or 1LE and 3CT or 3LE molecules from 2500 molecules generated by the binding of 50 donors and 50 acceptors, and the results of 26 molecules were confirmed by available experiments and first-principles calculations. Moreover, the modulation of these descriptors by chemical groups allows the rational design of target excited states. This work is significant for high-throughput screening of excellent organic photofunctional materials from a giant chemical database.