Correlation effects and excited states in conjugated polymers

Abstract

We apply the Hubbard-Peierls Hamiltonian to study the low-lying excited states of several model conjugated polymers. The calculations employ a numerical renormalization-group method for chains of intermediate length, and a more approximate truncated configuration-interaction scheme to extrapolate the results to longer systems. In the range of on-site Coulomb repulsion strengths of physical interest, we find that a correlated even-parity singlet excited state competes with the odd-parity singlet excitation expected in the U=0 limit of the model, in agreement with previous studies on the Pariser-Parr-Pople model. The lowest electronic excitations in the model are identified as triplet excitations. Self-consistently-relaxed lattice configurations surrounding these electronic excitations are studied. In addition to the stable photoexcitations predicted in the U=0 limit of the theory, we find that the interelectronic repulsive potential leads to a rich spectrum of competing neutral structures, which are studied and characterized. Coulomb correlations provide a mechanism for production of long-lived spin-1/2 neutral excitations for degenerate ground-state systems, and spin-1 neutral excitations for nondegenerate ground-state systems.