Reorganization energy and polaronic effects of pentacene on NaCl films

Abstract

Due to recent advances in scanning-probe technology, the electronic structure of individual molecules can now also be investigated if they are immobilized by adsorption on non-conductive substrates. As a consequence, different molecular charge-states are now experimentally accessible. Thus motivated, we investigate as an experimentally relevant example the electronic and structural properties of a NaCl(001) surface with and without pentacene adsorbed (neutral and charged) by employing density functional theory. We estimate the polaronic reorganization energy to be $E_\text{reorg} \simeq 0.8-1.0$ eV, consistent with experimental results obtained for molecules of similar size. To account for environmental effects on this estimate, different models for charge screening are compared. Finally, we calculate the density profile of one of the frontier orbitals for different occupation and confirm the experimentally observed localization of the charge density upon relaxation of the substrate from ab-initio calculations.