Structure and properties of metal-exchanged zeolites studied using gradient-corrected and hybrid functionals. II. Electronic structure and photoluminescence spectra

The influence of the choice of the exchange-correlation functional (semilocal gradient corrected or hybrid functionals) on the electronic properties of metal-exchanged zeolites has been investigated for Cu- and Co-exchanged chabazite. The admixture of exact exchange in hybrid functionals increases the fundamental gap of purely siliceous chabazite, leading to better agreement with experiment and many-body perturbation theory for close-packed SiO2 polymorphs where detailed experimental information is available. For the metal-exchanged chabazite the increased exchange splitting strongly influences the position of the cation states relative to the framework bands-in general, gradient-corrected functionals locate the occupied cation states close to the valence-band maximum of the framework, while hybrid functionals shift the occupied cation states to larger binding energies and the empty states to higher energies within the fundamental gap. The photoluminescence spectra have been analyzed using fixed-moment total-energy calculations for excited spin states in structurally relaxed and frozen geometries. The geometrical relaxation of the excited states leads to large differences in excitation and emission energies which are more pronounced in calculations using hybrid functionals. Due to the stronger relaxation effects calculated with hybrid functionals, the large differences in the electronic spectra calculated with both types of functionals are not fully reflected in the photoluminescence spectra. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3676409]