Radical ions with nearly degenerate ground state: Correlation between the rate of spin-lattice relaxation and the structure of adiabatic potential energy surface

Unexpectedly Large Spin Coherence Effects in the Recombination Fluorescence from Irradiated Highly Polar Solutions on a Nanosecond Time Scale

Spin correlation effects in the geminate recombination of radical ion pairs in irradiated highly polar liquids are typically believed to be negligible due to a high escape probability for the ions. This report presents the results of an exploratory study of organic polar solvents aimed at the searching for, and estimating the magnitude of, the time-resolved magnetic field effects (TR MFEs) in the delayed radiation-induced fluorescence from diluted solutions of a luminophore. It has been found that upon the high-energy irradiation of the solutions in polar liquids, such as dichloroethane (ε ≈ 10), methanol (ε ≈ 33), acetonitrile (ε ≈ 37), dimethylformamide (ε ≈ 37), dimethyl sulfoxide (ε ≈ 47), ethylene carbonate (ε ≈ 89), substantial spin coherence effects in the delayed fluorescence can be observed within a time range up to ∼100 ns. In most of the cases studied, magnetic resonance characteristics of primary or very early solvent-related radical ions were evaluated from the TR MFE curves. This approach can, therefore, be widely used to complement results obtained by the pulse radiolysis technique with structural and kinetic data extracted from the magnetic resonance characteristics of the short-lived radical ions formed in irradiated media.

Surface hopping with a manifold of electronic states. I. Incorporating surface-leaking to capture lifetimes

We investigate the incorporation of the surface-leaking (SL) algorithm into Tully's fewest-switches surface hopping (FSSH) algorithm to simulate some electronic relaxation induced by an electronic bath in conjunction with some electronic transitions between discrete states. The resulting SL-FSSH algorithm is benchmarked against exact quantum scattering calculations for three one-dimensional model problems. The results show excellent agreement between SL-FSSH and exact quantum dynamics in the wide band limit, suggesting the potential for a SL-FSSH algorithm. Discrepancies and failures are investigated in detail to understand the factors that will limit the reliability of SL-FSSH, especially the wide band approximation. Considering the easiness of implementation and the low computational cost, we expect this method to be useful in studying processes involving both a continuum of electronic states (where electronic dynamics are probabilistic) and processes involving only a few electronic states (where non-adiabatic processes cannot ignore short-time coherence).