Despite the variety of available computational approaches, state-of-the-art methods for calculating excitation energies, such as time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), are computationally demanding and thus limited to moderate system sizes. Here, we introduce a new variation of constrained DFT (CDFT), wherein the constraint corresponds to a particular transition (T), or a combination of transitions, between occupied and virtual orbitals, rather than a region of the simulation space as in traditional CDFT. We compare T-CDFT with TDDFT and ΔSCF results for the low-lying excited states (S 1 and T 1 ) of a set of gas-phase acene molecules and OLED emitters and with reference results from the literature. At the PBE level of theory, T-CDFT outperforms ΔSCF for both classes of molecules, while also proving to be more robust. For the local excitations seen in the acenes, T-CDFT and TDDFT perform equally well. For the charge transfer (CT)-like excitations seen in the OLED molecules, T-CDFT also performs well, in contrast to the severe energy underestimation seen with TDDFT. In other words, T-CDFT is equally applicable to both local excitations and CT states, providing more reliable excitation energies at a much lower computational cost than TDDFT cost. T-CDFT is designed for large systems and has been implemented in the linear-scaling BigDFT code. It is therefore ideally suited for exploring the effects of explicit environments on excitation energies, paving the way for future simulations of excited states in complex realistic morphologies, such as those which occur in OLED materials.

Despite the variety of available computational approaches, state-of-the-art methods for calculating excitation energies such as time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), are typically computationally demanding and thus limited to moderate system sizes. Here, we introduce a new variation of constrained DFT (CDFT), implemented in the wavelet-based BigDFT code, wherein the constraint corresponds to a particular transition (T) between occupied and virtual orbitals, rather than a region of the simulation space as in traditional CDFT. In this work, we perform benchmark T-CDFT calculations for a set of gas phase acene molecules and OLED emitters and compare them to ∆SCF and TDDFT results, for different functionals and basis sets. For both classes of molecules, we find that T-CDFT based on semi-local functionals is comparable to hybrid functional results from ∆SCF and TDDFT. Furthermore, T-CDFT proves to be more robust than ∆SCF and does not suffer from the well-known problems encountered when applying TDDFT to charge-transfer (CT) states, and is therefore equally applicable to both local excitations and CT states. Finally, since T-CDFT is designed for large systems and has been implemented in linear-scaling BigDFT, it is ideally suited for exploring the effects of explicit environments on excitation energies, paving the way for future simulations of excited states in complex realistic morphologies, such as those which occur in OLED materials.