Calculating Optical Absorption Spectra of Thin Polycrystalline Organic Films: Structural Disorder and Site-Dependent van der Waals Interaction

[Image: see text] We propose a new approach for calculating the change of the absorption spectrum of a molecule when moved from the gas phase to a crystalline morphology. The so-called gas-to-crystal shift Δ[Image: see text](m) is mainly caused by dispersion effects and depends sensitively on the molecule’s specific position in the nanoscopic setting. Using an extended dipole approximation, we are able to divide Δ[Image: see text](m)= −QW(m) in two factors, where Q depends only on the molecular species and accounts for all nonresonant electronic transitions contributing to the dispersion while W(m) is a geometry factor expressing the site dependence of the shift in a given molecular structure. The ability of our approach to predict absorption spectra is demonstrated using the example of polycrystalline films of 3,4,9,10-perylenetetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI).