Electronic and optical properties of a metal-organic framework with ab initio many-body perturbation theory*

With their unprecedented surface area, and their structural and chemical tunability, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are being thoroughly explored for applications related to gas storage. Less studied are their electronic, excited-state, and optical properties. Here we explored such properties of Mg-MOF-74 using a combination of density functional theory (DFT) and many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) within the GW approximation and the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) approach. The near-gap electronic conduction states were found to fall into two distinct categories: molecular-like and 1d-dispersive. Further, using the BSE approach, we predict a strongly anisotropic absorption spectrum, which we link to the nature of its strongly-bound excitons. Our calculations are found to be in good agreement with experimental absorption spectra, validating our theoretical approach.