Electronic and Optical Properties of Conjugated Polymers (International Series of Monographs on Physics (159))

Conjugated polymers have important technological applications, including solar cells and light emitting devices. They are also active components in many important biological processes. In recent years there have been significant advances in our understanding of these systems, owing to both improved experimental measurements and the development of advanced computational techniques. The aim of this book is to describe and explain the electronic and optical properties of conjugated polymers. It focuses on the three key roles of electron-electron interactions, electron-nuclear coupling, and disorder in determining the character of the electronic states, and it relates these properties to experimental observations in real systems. A number of important optical and electronic processes in conjugated polymers are also described. The second edition has a more extended discussion of excitons in conjugated polymers. There is also a new chapter on the static and dynamical localization of excitons. Content: 1. Introduction to conjugated polymers 2. PI-electron theories of conjugated polymers 3. Noninteracting electrons 4. Electron-nuclear coupling I: Noninteracting electrons 5. Interacting electrons 6. Excitons in conjugated polymers 7. Electron-nuclear coupling II: Interacting electrons 8. Linear polyenes and trans-polyacetylene 9. Light emitting polymers 10. Exciton localization in disordered polymers 11. Optical processes in conjugated polymers 12. Excitonic processes in conjugated polymers 13. Epilogue Appendix A: Dirac bra-ket operator representation of one-particle Hamiltonians Appendix B: Electron-hole symmetry and average occupation number Appendix C: Single-particle eigensolutions of a periodic polymer chain Appendix D: The Holstein model Appendix E: Derivation of the effective-particle Schrodinger equation Appendix F: Hydrogenic solutions of the effective-particle exciton models Appendix G: Valence-bond description of benzene Appendix H: Derivation of the Frenkel exciton Hamiltonian Appendix I: Evaluation of the electronic transition dipole moments Appendix J: Spin-orbit coupling in PI-conjugated polymers Appendix K: Derivation of the line dipole approximation Appendix L: Direct configuration interaction-singles calculations Appendix M: Density matrix renormalization group method
Conjugated polymers have important technological applications, including solar cells and light emitting displays. They are also active components in many biological processes. In recent years, there have been significant advances in our understanding of these systems, owing to both improved experimental measurements and the development of advanced computational techniques. The aim of this book is to describe and explain the electronic and optical properties of conjugated polymers. It focuses on the character and energetic ordering of the electronic states and relates these properties to experimental observations in real systems. Conjugated polymers have important technological applications including solar cells and light emitting devices. They are active components in many important biological processes. This book describes and explains the electronic and optical properties of conjugated polymers by developing theoretical models to understand the key electronic states.