Electroreflectance study of the charge-transfer excitons in anthracene-PMDA

Stark effect of intrinsic and extrinsic charge-transfer excitons in a linear donor-acceptor stack: anthracene-pyromellitic dianhydride

Anthracene-PMDA single crystals display at 2K about 70 meV below a well-known intrinsic charge-transfer exciton three narrow absorption lines, which are attributed to CT excitons bound to defects of a few 10(-5) concentration. All excitons respond very sensitively to electric fields along the molecular stack because of the large dipole moment, about 2 eA, of an ionized donor-acceptor pair, but only intrinsic excitons observe an optical selection rule. Although the triclinic unit cell contains only one pair of molecules, excitons appear in field-modulated spectra as near-degenerate doublets of different parity with very small splitting. The line shape of the EA spectra and selection rules with respect to the polarization of light and orientation of the field are consistent with the inversion symmetry of the lattice and the molecules. The simple crystal structure enables identification of the defects that are responsible for extrinsic excitons. Symmetry consideration based on translation invariance lead to a new interpretation of intrinsic excitons as true crystal states with charge transfer from the donor to the acceptor sublattice.

Quasidegenerate self-trapping in one-dimensional charge transfer exciton

The self-trapping by the nondiagonal particle-phonon interaction between two quasidegenerate energy levels of the excitonic system is studied. We propose this is realized in the charge-transfer exciton, where the directions of the polarization give the quasidegeneracy. It is shown that this mechanism, unlike the conventional diagonal one, allows a coexistence and resonance of the free and self-trapped states even in one-dimensional systems and a quantitative theory for the optical properties (light absorption and time-resolved luminescence) of the resonating states is presented. This theory gives a consistent resolution for the long-standing puzzles in quasi-one-dimensional compound A-PMDA.