A Structural Model for a Self-Assembled Nanotube Provides Insight into Its Exciton Dynamics

Understanding the Photoprocesses in Biological Systems: Need for Accurate Multireference Treatment

Light-matter interaction is crucial to life itself and revolves around many of the central processes in biology. The need for understanding these photochemical and photophysical processes cannot be overemphasized. Interaction of light with biological systems starts with the absorption of light and subsequent phenomena that occur in the excited states of the system. However, excited states are typically difficult to understand within the mean field approximation of quantum chemical methods. Therefore, suitable multireference methods and methodologies have been developed to understand these phenomena. In this Perspective, we will describe a few methods and methodologies suitable for these descriptions and discuss some persisting difficulties.

Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory for X-ray Absorption Spectra: Comparing the Real-Time Approach to Linear Response

We simulate X-ray absorption spectra at elemental K-edges using time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) in both its conventional linear-response implementation and its explicitly time-dependent or "real-time" formulation. Real-time TDDFT simulations enable broadband spectra calculations without the need to invoke frozen occupied orbitals ("core/valence separation"), but we find that these spectra are often contaminated by transitions to the continuum that originate from lower-energy core and semicore orbitals. This problem becomes acute in triple-ζ basis sets, although it is sometimes sidestepped in double-ζ basis sets. Transitions to the continuum acquire surprisingly large dipole oscillator strengths, leading to spectra that are difficult to interpret. Meaningful spectra can be recovered by means of a filtering technique that decomposes the spectrum into contributions from individual occupied orbitals, and the same procedure can be used to separate L- and K-edge spectra arising from different elements within a given molecule. In contrast, conventional linear-response TDDFT requires core/valence separation but is free of these artifacts. It is also significantly more efficient than the real-time approach, even when hundreds of individual states are needed to reproduce near-edge absorption features and even when Padé approximants are used to reduce the real-time simulations to just 2-4 fs of time propagation. Despite the cost, the real-time approach may be useful to examine the validity of the core/valence separation approximation.

The impact of metal coordination on the assembly of bis(indolyl)methane-naphthalene-diimide amphiphiles

The self-assembly and coordination of amphiphiles comprised of naphthalenediimide (NDI) and bis(indolyl)methane (BIM) chromophores were investigated as a function of pH and metal. As observed by TEM, SEM and AFM imaging, the self-assembly of NDI-BIM 1 produced irregular nanostructures at neutral pH in CH3CN-H2O (1 : 1); whereas, well-defined nanotubes were observed at pH 2. Conversely, Fmoc-protected, NDI-BIM 2 formed nanotubes at neutral pH and nonspecific aggregates at pH 2. Upon coordination of Cu2+ ions to the bis(indoyl)methane moiety, a reorganization from nanotubes to vesicular structures was observed.

Soft-Matter Nanotubes: A Platform for Diverse Functions and Applications

Self-assembled organic nanotubes made of single or multiple molecular components can be classified into soft-matter nanotubes (SMNTs) by contrast with hard-matter nanotubes, such as carbon and other inorganic nanotubes. To date, diverse self-assembly processes and elaborate template procedures using rationally designed organic molecules have produced suitable tubular architectures with definite dimensions, structural complexity, and hierarchy for expected functions and applications. Herein, we comprehensively discuss every functions and possible applications of a wide range of SMNTs as bulk materials or single components. This Review highlights valuable contributions mainly in the past decade. Fifteen different families of SMNTs are discussed from the viewpoints of chemical, physical, biological, and medical applications, as well as action fields (e.g., interior, wall, exterior, whole structure, and ensemble of nanotubes). Chemical applications of the SMNTs are associated with encapsulating materials and sensors. SMNTs also behave, while sometimes undergoing morphological transformation, as a catalyst, template, liquid crystal, hydro-/organogel, superhydrophobic surface, and micron size engine. Physical functions pertain to ferro-/piezoelectricity and energy migration/storage, leading to the applications to electrodes or supercapacitors, and mechanical reinforcement. Biological functions involve artificial chaperone, transmembrane transport, nanochannels, and channel reactors. Finally, medical functions range over drug delivery, nonviral gene transfer vector, and virus trap.

Light-controlled self-assembly of a dithienylethene bolaamphiphile in water

In this work, we report the light-driven self-assembly of photochromic dithienylethene bolaamphiphiles in aqueous media. The open → closed transition that occurred upon irradiation was accompanied by the formation of 1D nanofibers.

Threading carbon nanotubes through a self-assembled nanotube

Achieving the co-assembly of more than one component represents an important challenge in the drive to create functional self-assembled nanomaterials. Multicomponent nanomaterials comprised of several discrete, spatially sorted domains of components with high degrees of internal order are particularly important for applications such as optoelectronics. In this work, single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) were threaded through the inner channel of nanotubes formed by the bolaamphiphilic self-assembly of a naphthalenediimide-lysine (NDI-Bola) monomer. The self-assembly process was driven by electrostatic interactions, as indicated by ζ-potential measurements, and cation-π interactions between the surface of the SWNT and the positively charged, NDI-Bola nanotube interior. To increase the threading efficiency, the NDI-Bola nanotubes were fragmented into shortened segments with lengths of <100 nm via sonication-induced shear, prior to co-assembly with the SWNTs. The threading process created an initial composite nanostructure in which the SWNTs were threaded by multiple, shortened segments of the NDI-Bola nanotube that progressively re-elongated along the SWNT surface into a continuous radial coating around the SWNT. The resultant composite structure displayed NDI-Bola wall thicknesses twice that of the parent nanotube, reflecting a bilayer wall structure, as compared to the monolayer structure of the parent NDI-Bola nanotube. As a final, co-axial outer layer, poly(p-phenyleneethynylene) (PPE-SO3Na, M W = 5.76 × 104, PDI - 1.11) was wrapped around the SWNT/NDI-Bola composite resulting in a three-component (SWNT/NDI-Bola/PPE-SO3Na) composite nanostructure.

Double-buffered, heterogeneous CPU + GPU integral digestion algorithm for single-excitation calculations involving a large number of excited states

The most widely used quantum-chemical models for excited states are single-excitation theories, a category that includes configuration interaction with single substitutions, time-dependent density functional theory, and also a recently developed ab initio exciton model. When a large number of excited states are desired, these calculations incur a significant bottleneck in the "digestion" step in which two-electron integrals are contracted with density or density-like matrices. We present an implementation that moves this step onto graphical processing units (GPUs), and introduce a double-buffer scheme that minimizes latency by computing integrals on the central processing units (CPUs) concurrently with their digestion on the GPUs. An automatic code generation scheme simplifies the implementation of high-performance GPU kernels. For the exciton model, which requires separate excited-state calculations on each electronically coupled chromophore, the heterogeneous implementation described here results in speedups of 2-6× versus a CPU-only implementation. For traditional time-dependent density functional theory calculations, we obtain speedups of up to 5× when a large number of excited states is computed. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Strategy for the Co-Assembly of Co-Axial Nanotube-Polymer Hybrids

Nanostructured materials having multiple, discrete domains of sorted components are particularly important to create efficient optoelectronics. The construction of multicomponent nanostructures from self-assembled components is exceptionally challenging due to the propensity of noncovalent materials to undergo structural reorganization in the presence of excipient polymers. This work demonstrates that polymer-nanotube composites comprised of a self-assembled nanotube wrapped with two conjugated polymers could be assembled using a layer-by-layer approach. The polymer-nanotube nanostructures arrange polymer layers coaxially on the nanotube surface. Femtosecond transient absorption (TA) studies indicated that the polymer-nanotube composites undergo photoinduced charge separation upon excitation of the NDI chromophore within the nanotube.

Controlling the length of self-assembled nanotubes by sonication followed by polymer wrapping

In this work, we report that sonication, followed by polymer-wrapping, is an effective strategy to reduce the length of self-assembled nanotubes and suspend their propensity to self-heal into their elongated precursors.

Enhancement of the photocatalytic activity of rhenium(i) complexes by encapsulation in light-harvesting soft nanotubes

The photocatalytic activity of a Re(i) complex encapsulated in dye-assembled nanotubes functioning as light-harvesting antennae was superior to that of a free Re(i) complex in bulk.

Beyond Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory Using Only Single Excitations: Methods for Computational Studies of Excited States in Complex Systems

Single-excitation methods, namely, configuration interaction singles and time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), along with semiempirical versions thereof, represent the most computationally affordable electronic structure methods for describing electronically excited states, scaling as [Formula: see text] absent further approximations. This relatively low cost, combined with a treatment of electron correlation, has made TDDFT the most widely used excited-state quantum chemistry method over the past 20+ years. Nevertheless, certain inherent problems (beyond just the accuracy of this or that exchange-correlation functional) limit the utility of traditional TDDFT. For one, it affords potential energy surfaces whose topology is incorrect in the vicinity of any conical intersection (CI) that involves the ground state. Since CIs are the conduits for transitions between electronic states, the TDDFT description of photochemistry (internal conversion and intersystem crossing) is therefore suspect. Second, the [Formula: see text] cost can become prohibitive in large systems, especially those that involve multiple electronically coupled chromophores, for example, the antennae structures of light-harvesting complexes or the conjugated polymers used in organic photovoltaics. In such cases, the smallest realistic mimics might already be quite large from the standpoint of ab initio quantum chemistry. This Account describes several new computational methods that address these problems. Topology around a CI can be rigorously corrected using a "spin-flip" version of TDDFT, which involves an α → β spin-flipping transition in addition to occupied → virtual excitation of one electron. Within this formalism, singlet states are generated via excitation from a high-spin triplet reference state, doublets from a quartet, etc. This provides a more balanced treatment of electron correlation between ground and excited states. Spin contamination is problematic away from the Franck-Condon region, but we describe a "spin-complete" version of the theory in which proper spin eigenstates are obtained by construction. For systems of coupled chromophores, we have developed an ab initio version of the Frenkel-Davydov exciton model in which collective excitations of the system are expanded in a basis of excited states computed for individual chromophores. The monomer calculations are trivially parallelizable, as is computation of the coupling matrix elements needed to construct the exciton Hamiltonian, and systems containing hundreds of chromophores can be tackled on commodity hardware. This enables calculations on organic semiconductors, where even small model systems exhibit a semicontinuum of excited states that renders traditional TDDFT computationally challenging. Despite including only single excitations on each monomer, the exciton model can describe entangled spins on two or more monomers, an effect that is responsible for excitation energy transfer between chromophores, for example, in singlet fission. Excitonic approximations can also be applied to the TDDFT equations themselves, and a particularly promising application is to describe the effects of environment on an excitation that is localized on a single chromophore. This "local excitation approximation" to TDDFT allows an essentially arbitrary number of solvent molecules to be included in the calculation in a highly parallelizable way such that the time-to-solution increases only very slowly as additional solvent molecules are added. It is therefore possible to converge the calculation with respect to describing an ever-larger portion of the environment at a quantum-mechanical level.

Low-Scaling Quantum Chemistry Approach to Excited-State Properties via an ab Initio Exciton Model: Application to Excitation Energy Transfer in a Self-Assembled Nanotube

We introduce a charge-embedding scheme for an excited-state quantum chemistry method aimed at weakly interacting molecular aggregates. The Hamiltonian matrix for the aggregate is constructed in a basis of direct products of configuration-state functions for the monomers, and diagonalization of this matrix affords excitation energies within ∼0.2 eV of the corresponding supersystem calculation. Both the basis states and the coupling matrix elements can be computed in a distributed way, resulting in an algorithm whose time-to-solution is independent of the number of chromophores, and we report calculations on systems with almost 55 000 basis functions using fewer than 450 processors. In a semiconducting organic nanotube, we find evidence of ultrafast, coherent dynamics followed by energy localization driven by static disorder. Truncation of the model system has a qualitative effect on the energy-transfer dynamics, demonstrating the importance of simulating an extended portion of the nanotube, which is not feasible using traditional quantum chemistry.