Abstract

A general approach to determine orientation and distance-dependent effective intermolecular exciton transfer integrals from many-body Green’s functions theory is presented. On the basis of the GW approximation and the Bethe–Salpeter equation (BSE), a projection technique is employed to obtain the excitonic coupling by forming the expectation value of a supramolecular BSE Hamiltonian with electron–hole wave functions for excitations localized on two separated chromophores. Within this approach, accounting for the effects of coupling mediated by intermolecular charge transfer (CT) excitations is possible via perturbation theory or a reduction technique. Application to model configurations of pyrene dimers shows an accurate description of short-range exchange and long-range Coulomb interactions for the coupling of singlet and triplet excitons. Computational parameters, such as the choice of the exchange-correlation functional in the density-functional theory (DFT) calculations that underly the GW-BSE steps and the convergence with the number of included CT excitations, are scrutinized. Finally, an optimal strategy is derived for simulations of full large-scale morphologies by benchmarking various approximations using pairs of dicyanovinyl end-capped oligothiophenes (DCV5T), which are used as donor material in state-of-the-art organic solar cells.