Effect of Imide Functionalization on the Electronic, Optical, and Charge Transport Properties of Coronene: A Theoretical Study

We investigate the energetics, electronic structure, optical properties, and charge transfer characteristics of coronene and its imide-functionalized derivatives using quantum chemical calculations. We analyze the formation feasibility of pristine coronene and its different imide monomers, namely, coronene-5-diimide, coronene-6-diimide, and coronene-tetraimide, from a common parental compound, coronene octacarboxylic acid, and find that the most favorable derivative is the pure coronene. Our results also show that coronene-6-diimide is preferred over other possible imide compounds, which is well in accordance with the relative experimental abundance of coronene-6-diimide. The absorption characteristics obtained for both the monomer and dimer of coronene imides show bathochromic shifts for the low-energy peak positions in comparison to the pristine coronene because of the presence of the electron withdrawing imide groups, and the trend in transition energy follows the order of the electronic gap. Interestingly, we find a larger extent of red shift for the absorption maxima of the synthetically more feasible coronene-6-diimide among others. Moreover, our analysis also shows that the extent of red shift strongly depends on the position and orientations of the imide groups, and the low-energy peaks solely correspond to the pi-pi* electronic transitions. Furthermore, we also calculate the charge (electron and hole) transfer integrals for the plausible stable dimers, and find that effective hole transfer integrals are significantly larger than the electron transfer integral except for the coronene-tetraimide, for which the electron transfer integral is found to be greater than the hole transfer integral. The calculated carrier mobilities for the coronene crystal show that the hole mobility is significantly larger, almost 15 times, than the electron mobility. Our study provides a detailed understanding of the tunable optical and charge transfer properties for imide-functionalized coronene derivatives, and suggests their potential use in optoelectronic and field effect transistor devices.