How are the charge transfer descriptors affected by the quality of the underpinning electronic density?

With the aim of investigating qualitatively and quantitatively the impact of using excited state relaxed or unrelaxed density for the estimation of nature and characteristic of electronic excited states, we analyzed the behavior of 52 exchange correlation functionals for the prediction of density‐based indexes such as those recently introduced in literature to evaluate the charge transfer distance (D_CT) (Le Bahers et al. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2011, 7, 2498) in the case of a prototype family of push–pull dyes. Our results show that while a qualitatively consistent assessment of the nature of the excited states is obtained using either the unrelaxed or the relaxed density, from a quantitative standpoint we observe large discrepancies in the charge transfer distance for electronic transitions having substantial CT character. This behavior is independent of nature of the exchange–correlation functional used. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.