Simulating optical linear absorption for mesoscale molecular aggregates: an adaptive hierarchy of pure states approach

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new method for calculating linear absorption spectra for large molecular aggregates, called dyadic adaptive HOPS (DadHOPS). This method combines the adaptive HOPS (adHOPS) framework, which uses locality to improve computational scaling, with the dyadic HOPS method previously developed to calculate linear and non-linear spectroscopic signals. To construct a local representation of dyadic HOPS, we introduce an initial state decomposition which reconstructs the linear absorption spectra from a sum over locally excited initial conditions. We demonstrate the sum over initial conditions can be efficiently Monte Carlo sampled, that the corresponding calculations achieve size-invariant (i.e. $\mathcal{O}(1)$) scaling for sufficiently large aggregates, and that it allows for the trivial inclusion of static disorder in the Hamiltonian. We present calculations on the photosystem I core complex to explore the behavior of the initial state decomposition in complex molecular aggregates, and proof-of-concept DadHOPS calculations on an artificial molecular aggregate inspired by perylene bis-imide.