Insights into localization, energy ordering, and substituent effect in excited states of azobenzenes from coupled cluster calculations of nuclear spin-induced circular dichroism

Nuclear spin-induced circular dichroism (NSCD) is a molecular effect of differential absorption of left- and right-circularly polarized light due to nuclear spins in the molecule. In this work, new tools for its calculation are presented. Specifically, analytic expressions for the computation of the 000000001111110000 000001110000001100 000010000000110110 000010001001100010 000100001011000100 000010010011001100 000001100110110000 000000001110001000 011000001100011000 011100011100011000 000010110100110000 000011100011100000 K term of NSCD have been derived and implemented for the second-order coupled cluster singles and doubles (CC2) model. NSCD results obtained thereby for three derivatives of azobenzenes have been compared with results from time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT). The complementary information that could be obtained from NSCD measurements compared to NMR for these three species is discussed. Due to its sensitivity to the local electronic structure, nuclear spin-induced circular dichroism can be used to gain insight into properties of excited states. New computational tools for its calculation are presented.