Triplet state photochemistry and the three-state crossing of acetophenone within time-dependent density-functional theory

Even though time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT) works generally well for describing excited states energies and properties in the Franck-Condon region, it can dramatically fail in predicting photochemistry, notably when electronic state crossings occur. Here, we assess the ability of TDDFT to describe the photochemistry of an important class of triplet sensitizers, namely, aromatic ketones. We take acetophenone as a test molecule, for which accurate ab initio results exist in the literature. Triplet acetophenone is generated thanks to an exotic three-state crossing involving one singlet and two triplets states (i.e., a simultaneous intersystem crossing and triplet conical intersection), thus being a stringent test for approximate TDDFT. We show that most exchange-correlation functionals can only give a semi-qualitative picture of the overall photochemistry, in which the three-state crossing is rather represented as a triplet conical intersection separated from the intersystem crossing. The best result overall is given by the double hybrid functional mPW2PLYP, which is even able to reproduce quantitatively the three-state crossing region. We rationalize this results by noting that double hybrid functionals include a larger portion of double excitation character to the excited states.