Ab Initio Many-Body Perturbation Theory Calculations of the Electronic and Optical Properties of Cyclometalated Ir(III) Complexes

Cyclometalated Ir­(III) compounds are the preferred choice as organic emitters in organic light-emitting diodes. In practice, the presence of the transition metal surrounded by carefully designed ligands allows fine-tuning of the emission frequency as well as good efficiency of the device. To support the development of new compounds, experimental measurements are generally compared with absorption and emission spectra obtained from ab initio calculations. The standard approach for these calculations is time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) with a hybrid exchange–correlation functional like B3LYP. Because of the size of these compounds, the application of more complex quantum chemistry approaches can be challenging. In this work, we used many-body perturbation theory approaches, in particular the GW approximation with the Bethe–Salpeter equation (BSE) implemented in Gaussian basis sets, to calculate the quasiparticle properties and the absorption spectra of six cyclometalated Ir­(III) complexes, going beyond TDDFT. In the presented results, we compared standard TDDFT simulations with BSE calculations performed on top of perturbative G0W0 and accounting for eigenvalue self-consistency. Moreover, in order to investigate in detail the effect of the DFT starting point, we concentrated on Ir­(ppy)3 and performed GW-BSE simulations starting from different DFT exchange–correlation potentials.