Time-Dependent Extension of the Long-Range Corrected Density Functional Based Tight-Binding Method

We present a consistent linear response formulation of the density functional based tight-binding method for long-range corrected exchange-correlation functionals (LC-DFTB). Besides a detailed account of derivation and implementation of the method, we also test the new scheme on a variety of systems considered to be problematic for conventional local/semilocal time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT). To this class belong the optical properties of polyacenes and nucleobases, as well as charge transfer excited states in molecular dimers. We find that the approximate LC-DFTB method.exhibits the same general trends and similar accuracy as range separated DFT methods at significantly reduced computational cost. The scheme should be especially useful in the determination of the electronic excited states of very conventional TD-DFT is supposed to fail due to a multitude of artificial low energy states.