I have written about extracting information from excited state calculations but an important consideration when analyzing the results is the proper use of the keyword density.

This keyword let’s Gaussian know which density is to be used in calculating some results. An important property to be calculated when dealing with excited states is the change in dipole moment between the ground state and any given state. The Transition Dipole Moment is an important quantity that allows us to predict whether any given electronic transition will be allowed or not. A change in the dipole moment (i.e. non-zero) of a molecule during an electronic transition helps us characterize said transition.

Say you perform a TD-DFT calculation without the density keyword, the default will provide results on the lowest excited state from all the requested states, which may or may not be the state of interest to the transition of interest; you may be interested in the dipole moment of all your excited states.

Three separate calculations would be required to calculate the change of dipole moment upon an electronic transition:

1) A regular DFT for the ground state as a reference
2) TD-DFT, to calculate the electronic transitions; request as many states as you need/want, analyze it and from there you can see which transition is the most important.
3) Request the density of the Nth state of interest to be recovered from the checkpoint file with the following route section:

# TD(Read,Root=N) LOT Density=Current Guess=Read Geom=AllCheck

replace N for the Nth state which caught your eye in step number 2) and LOT for the Level of Theory you’ve been using in the previous steps. That should give you the dipole moment for the structure of the Nth excited state and you can compare it with the one in the ground state calculated in 1). Again, if density=current is not used, only properties of N=1 will be printed.

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