Vibronic energies and spectra of molecular dimers

Abstract

We consider three distinct methods of calculating the vibronic levels and absorption spectra of molecular dimers coupled by dipole-dipole interactions. The first method is direct diagonalization of the vibronic Hamiltonian in a basis of monomer eigenstates. The second method is to use creation and annihilation operators leading in harmonic approximation to the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. The adiabatic approximation to this problem provides insight into spectral behavior in the weak and strong coupling limits. The third method, which serves as a check on the accuracy of the previous methods, is a numerically exact solution of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. Using these methods, dimer spectra are calculated for three separate dye molecules and show good agreement with measured spectra.