Syntheses of covalently-linked porphyrin-quinone complexes

Trap-Door-Like Irreversible Photoinduced Charge Transfer in a Donor-Acceptor Complex

For efficient conversion of light into useful energy sources, it is very important to study and describe the first steps of primary charge-transfer process in natural structures and artificial devices. The time scale of these processes in artificial photosynthetic and photovoltaic devices is on the order of femto- to picoseconds and involves vibronic coupling of electrons and nuclei and also nuclear alleviation to enhance charge separation. Here we present an atomistic description of the photoexcited electron dynamics in a noncovalently bonded system formed by an hydrogenated nanodiamond as donor and a perylene diimide as an acceptor. The complex shows extremely fast charge transfer, separation, and stabilization within 90 fs. This stabilization is purely electronic in nature. To the best of our knowledge, these results show for the first time that it is possible to stabilize charge without polaron formation or nuclear relaxation, reaching a steady state enhanced by a pure electronic reorganization.

Supramolecular photochemistry applied to artificial photosynthesis and molecular logic devices

Supramolecular photochemical systems consist of photochemically active components such as chromophores, electron donors or electron acceptors that are associated via non-covalent or covalent interactions and that interact in some functional way. Examples of interactions are singlet–singlet energy transfer, triplet–triplet energy transfer, photoinduced electron transfer, quantum coherence and spin–spin magnetic interactions. Supramolecular photochemical “devices” may have applications in areas such as solar energy conversion, molecular logic, computation and data storage, biomedicine, sensing, imaging, and displays. This short review illustrates supramolecular photochemistry with examples drawn from artificial photosynthesis, molecular logic, analog photochemical devices and models for avian magnetic orientation.

Synthesis and spectral property study of porphyrin-anthraquinone dyads bonded through azo

To determine if the dihedral angle between the phenyl group and the porphyrin ring in the meso-phenyl porphyrin (H2TPP) could be adjusted by selective substitution of the naphthyl group for phenyl groups, novel dyads with a free-base porphyrin donor and anthraquinone acceptor linked by a rigid azo bond were synthesized and their spectral properties were investigated in detail. The Soret absorption band of dyads with meso-naphthyl groups in porphyrin shows 5–7 nm red shift as compared to the corresponding raw materials due to the introduction of the anthraquinone moiety. Fluorescence from the porphyrin moiety was found to be intensely quenched with the addition of anthraquinone moiety in the dyads; the highest quenching rate was observed to be 95% in the dyad prepared by meso-tetranaphthyl porphyrin. This indicates that the efficiency of the intramolecular photoinduced electron transfer in porphyrin-anthraquinone dyads could be changed by substituting the meso-phenyl group in porphyrin for the meso-naphthyl group.