Density functional theory (DFT) study of triphenylamine-based dyes for their use as sensitizers in molecular photovoltaics

In this work we studied three dyes which are proposed for potential photovoltaic applications and named Dye7, Dye7-2t and Dye7-3t. The Density Functional Theory (DFT) was utilized, using the M05-2X hybrid meta-GGA functional and the 6-31+G(d,p) basis set. This level of calculation was used to find the optimized molecular structure and to predict the main molecular vibrations, the absorption and emission spectra, the molecular orbitals energies, dipole moment, isotropic polarizability and the chemical reactivity parameters that arise from Conceptual DFT. Also, the pK(a) values were calculated with the semi-empirical PM6 method.