UC Berkeley

The accurate prediction of electronic excitation energies in molecules is an area of intense research of significant fundamental interest and is critical for many applications. Today, most excited state calculations use time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) in conjunction with an approximate exchange-correlation functional. In this dissertation, I have examined and critically assessed an alternative method for predicting charged and low-lying neutral excitations with similar computational cost: the \textit{ab initio} Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) approach. Rigorously based on many-body Green's function theory but incorporating information from density functional theory, the predictive power of the BSE approach remained at the beginning of this work unexplored for the neutral and charged electronic excitations of organic molecules. Here, the results and implications of several systematic benchmarks are laid out in detail.