Optical Saturation Driven by Exciton Confinement in Molecular Chains: A Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory Approach

We identify excitonic confinement in one-dimensional molecular chains (i.e., polyacetylene and H2) as the main driving force for the saturation of the chain polarizability as a function of the number of molecular units. This conclusion is based on first principles time-dependent density-functional theory calculations using a recently developed exchange-correlation kernel that accounts for excitonic effects. The failure of simple local and semilocal functionals is shown to be linked to the lack of memory effects, spatial ultranonlocality, and self-interaction corrections. These effects get smaller as the gap reduces, in which case such simple approximations do perform better.