Upon ultraviolet excitation, photochromic spiropyran compounds can be converted by a ring-opening reaction into merocyanine molecules, which in turn can form several isomers differing by cis and trans configurations in the methine bridge. Whereas the spiropyran-merocyanine conversion reaction of the nitro-substituted indolinobenzopyran 6-nitro-1',3',3'-trimethylspiro[2H-1-benzopyran-2,2'-indoline] (6-nitro BIPS) has been studied extensively in theory and experiments, little is known about photoisomerization among the merocyanine isomers. In this article, we employ femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy with variable excitation wavelengths to investigate the excited-state dynamics of the merocyanine in acetonitrile at room temperature, where exclusively the trans-trans-cis (TTC) and trans-trans-trans (TTT) isomers contribute. No photochemical ring-closure pathways exist for the two isomers. Instead, we found that (18±4)% of excited TTC isomers undergo an ultrafast excited-state cis→trans photoisomerization to TTT within 200 fs, while the excited-state lifetime of TTC molecules that do not isomerize is 35 ps. No photoisomerization was detected for the TTT isomer, which relaxes to the ground state with a lifetime of roughly 160 ps. Moreover, signal oscillations at 170 cm(-1) and 360 cm(-1) were observed, which can be ascribed to excited-state wave-packet dynamics occurring in the course of the TTC→TTT isomerization. The results of high-level time-dependent density functional theory in conjunction with polarizable continuum models are presented in the subsequent article [C. Walter, S. Ruetzel, M. Diekmann, P. Nuernberger, T. Brixner, and B. Engels, J. Chem. Phys. 140, 224311 (2014)].
Coherent multidimensional electronic spectroscopy is commonly used to investigate photophysical phenomena such as light harvesting in photosynthesis in which the system returns back to its ground state after energy transfer. By contrast, we introduce multidimensional spectroscopy to study ultrafast photochemical processes in which the investigated molecule changes permanently. Exemplarily, the emergence in 2D and 3D spectra of a cross-peak between reactant and product reveals the cis-trans photoisomerization of merocyanine isomers. These compounds have applications in organic photovoltaics and optical data storage. Cross-peak oscillations originate from a vibrational wave packet in the electronically excited state of the photoproduct. This concept isolates the isomerization dynamics along different vibrational coordinates assigned by quantum-chemical calculations, and is applicable to determine chemical dynamics in complex photoreactive networks.photoreactive processes | ultrafast spectroscopy | 2D spectroscopy | vibrational coherence A basic objective of physical chemistry is to determine the mechanisms underlying chemical reactions. Fundamental insights into these are provided by femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopy, even below the timescale of molecular vibrations (1). The major challenge of ultrafast photochemistry is to identify isolated signatures of reactants, intermediates, and products, whose spectral bands often overlap. Here we show that such ambiguities are unraveled by coherent multidimensional electronic spectroscopy, e.g., 2D and 3D spectroscopy, where the correlation of a system's excitation and emission frequencies is measured separating features that otherwise superpose. We detect photoreactivity directly via cross-peaks in multidimensional spectra. This opens the broad field of femtochemistry (1) to the multidimensional concept.Two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2-5) was primarily implemented for studying photophysical phenomena such as energy transfer in multichromophore light-harvesting systems or other excitonically coupled systems (6-11). Recently, charge transfer has also been investigated (12, 13). Here we are interested in photochemical processes leading to ground-state product species with a molecular configuration that is different from the initial reactant. As a general extension of 2D spectroscopy, 3D representations provide an even more detailed picture. Coherent 3D spectroscopy has been introduced to infrared spectroscopy (14, 15), and recently to electronic spectroscopy for isolating excitonic coherences (16, 17), for liquid-and gas-phase model systems (18)(19)(20), and for analyzing photosynthetic lightharvesting (21,22). Regarding these approaches, one has to differentiate between fifth-order experiments (14, 15, 19) for effects of higher nonlinearity (e.g., three-point frequency-fluctuation correlation functions) (14) and third-order techniques (20)(21)(22)(23)(24), as demonstrated here to unravel photochemical reactions.The principal idea of multidimensional spectrosc...
The photochemical isomerization of the trans-trans-cis to the trans-trans-trans isomer of the merocyanine form of 6-nitro BIPS, which has been studied with femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy [S. Ruetzel, M. Diekmann, P. Nuernberger, C. Walter, B. Engels, and T. Brixner, J. Chem. Phys. 140, 224310 (2014)], is investigated using time-dependent density functional theory in conjunction with polarizable continuum models. Benchmark calculations against SCS-ADC(2) evaluate the applicability of the CAM-B3LYP functional. Apart from a relaxed scan in the ground state with additional computation of the corresponding excitation energies, which produces the excited-state surface vertical to the ground-state isomerization coordinate, a relaxed scan in the S1 gives insight into the geometric changes orthogonal to the reaction coordinate and the fluorescence conditions. The shape of the potential energy surface (PES) along the reaction coordinate is found to be highly sensitive to solvation effects, with the method of solvation (linear response vs. state-specific) being critical. The shape of the PES as well as the computed harmonic frequencies in the S1 minima are in line with the experimental results and offer a straightforward interpretation.
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