  The lowest electronic excitations of benzene and a set of donor-acceptor
molecular complexes are calculated for the gas phase and on the Al(111) surface
using the many-body Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE). The energy of the
charge-transfer excitations obtained for the gas phase complexes are found to
be around 10% lower than the experimental values. When the molecules are placed
outside the surface, the enhanced screening from the metal reduces the exciton
binding energies by several eVs and the transition energies by up to 1 eV
depending on the size of the transition-generated dipole. As a striking
consequence we find that close to the metal surface the optical gap of benzene
can exceed its quasiparticle gap. A classical image charge model for the
screened Coulomb interaction can account for all these effects which, on the
other hand, are completely missed by standard time-dependent density functional
theory.
