In a comprehensive study, structural properties, electronic structure and optical response of crystalline o-phenanthroline were investigated. Our results show that in generalized gradient approximation (GGA) approximation, o-phenanthroline is a direct bandgap semiconductor of 2.60 eV. In the framework of many-body approach, by solving the Bethe–Salpeter equation (BSE), dielectric properties of crystalline o-phenanthroline were studied and compared with phenanthrene. Highly anisotropic components of the imaginary part of the macroscopic dielectric function in o-phenanthroline show four main excitonic features in the bandgap region. In comparison to phenanthrene, these excitons occur at lower energies. Due to smaller bond lengths originated from the polarity nature of bonds in presence of nitrogen atoms, denser packing, and therefore, a weaker screening effect, exciton binding energies in o-phenanthroline were found to be larger than those in phenanthrene. Our results showed that in comparison to the independent-particle picture, excitonic effects highly redistribute the oscillator strength.
