Electronic excitations in polyaniline: An INDO/S-CI study

Abstract

We investigate the electronic excitation in aniline tetramers at various levels of oxidation and protonation. We show that for certain geometrical conformations there is excellent agreement between our results and recently published experimental data. The neutral forms of the tetramer are shown to have excitation spectra almost identical to polymer equivalents. For the doubly protonated emeraldine tetramer we propose a bipolaron type of defect state, unlike in its polymer equivalent for which a polaronic metal model has been proposed. The electronic transitions associated with the bipolaron are shown to involve only one bipolaron level in contrast to the common picture of two bipolaron levels.