Comparison of the Transition Dipole Moments Calculated by TDDFT with High Level Wave Function Theory.

Time dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) is widely used to simulate the excited states of organic and inorganic molecules. We calculate the transition dipole moments (TDM) for a selection of commonly employed exchange-correlation functionals for a test set of 15 molecules and compare them with both linear response CC3 and ADC(3) calculated TDMs, which we use as a benchmark. Contemporary range-separated hybrid functionals perform the best for both direction and magnitude, while "pure" local functionals should be employed with caution.