Electronic excitations in long polyenes revisited.

We apply the valence shell model OM2 [W. Weber and W. Thiel, Theor. Chem. Acc. 103, 495, (2000)] combined with multireference configuration interaction (MRCI) to compute the vertical excitation energies and transition dipole moments of the low-energy singlet excitations in the polyenes with 4 ≤ N ≤ 22π-electrons. We find that the OM2/MRCI descriptions closely resemble those of Pariser-Parr-Pople (PPP) π-electron models [P. Tavan and K. Schulten, Phys. Rev. B 36, 4337, (1987)], if equivalent MRCI procedures and regularly alternating model geometries are used. OM2/MRCI optimized geometries are shown to entail improved descriptions particularly for smaller polyenes (N ≤ 12), for which sizeable deviations from the regular model geometries are found. With configuration interaction active spaces covering also the σ- in addition to the π-electrons, OM2/MRCI excitation energies turn out to become smaller by at most 0.35 eV for the ionic and 0.15 eV for the covalent excitations. The particle-hole (ph) symmetry, which in Pariser-Parr-Pople models arises from the zero-differential overlap approximation, is demonstrated to be only weakly broken in OM2 such that the oscillator strengths of the covalent 1B(u)(-) states, which artificially vanish in ph-symmetric models, are predicted to be very small. According to OM2/MRCI and experimental data the 1B(u)(-) state is the third excited singlet state for N < 12 and becomes the second for N ≥ 14. By comparisons with results of other theoretical approaches and experimental evidence we argue that deficiencies of the particular MRCI method employed by us, which show up in a poor size consistency of the covalent excitations for N > 12, are caused by its restriction to at most doubly excited references.