Tracking the early nonadiabatic events of ESIPT process in 2-acetylindan-1,3-dione by quantum wavepacket dynamics

Influence of Solvents and Halogenation on ESIPT of Benzimidazole Derivatives for Designing Turn-on Fluorescence Probes

This work reports a theoretical investigation of the solvent polarity as well as the halogenation of benzimidazole derivatives during excited state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT). It details how the environment and halogen substitution may contribute to the efficiency of ESIPT upon keto-enol tautomerism and exploits this effect to design fluorescence sensing. For this purpose, we first examine the conformational equilibrium of benzimidazole derivatives containing different halogen atoms, which results in intramolecular proton transfer, using density-functional theory (DFT) combined with the polarizable continuum model (PCM). Then we evaluate the fluorescence of the benzimidazole derivatives in different dielectric constants within time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) approaches. Our results quantitatively allow the determination of large Stokes shifts in nonpolar solvents around 100 nm. These theoretical results are in agreement with experimental solvatochromism studies of benzimidazoles. The effect of halogenation, with fluorine, chlorine, and bromine, is less important than solvent polarization when ESIPT takes place. Thus, halogenation can be properly chosen depending on the interest of the synthesis of benzimidazole-based turn-on fluorescence in appropriate solvents.

Theoretical approach to modeling the early nonadiabatic events of ESIPT originating from three-state conical intersection in quinophthalone

We explore the excited-state intramolecular proton transfer process of quinophthalone theoretically. This molecule possesses three low-lying singlet excited states ([Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]) in a narrow energy gap of less than the N-H stretching frequency. Dynamics simulations show nonadiabatic wavepacket transfer to [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] upon initiating the wavepacket on [Formula: see text]. Multiple accessible conical intersections that lie in the Franck-Condon region facilitate the nonadiabatic wavepacket transfer. Nuclear densities associated with the proton transfer promoting vibrations would start accumulating on [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] within a few tens of femtoseconds, validating the involvement of these vibrations in the nonadiabatic events that occur before the proton transfer process. Our findings emphasize the necessity of refined kinetic models for assigning the time constants of ultrafast transient spectroscopy measurements due to the simultaneous evolution of nonadiabatic events and proton transfer kinetics in quinophthalone.