Secondary electron emission is the most important stage in the mechanism of radiation damage to DNA biopolymers induced by primary ionizing radiation. These secondary electrons ejected by the primary electron impacts can produce further ionizations, initiating an avalanche effect, leading to genome damage through the energy transfer from the primary objects to sensitive biomolecular targets, such as nitrogenous bases, saccharides, and other DNA and peptide components. In this work, the formation of positive and negative ions of purine bases of nucleic acids (adenine and guanine molecules) under the impact of slow electrons (from 0.1 till 200 eV) is studied by the crossed electron and molecular beams technique. The method used makes it possible to measure the molecular beam intensity and determine the total cross-sections for the formation of positive and negative ions of the studied molecules, their energy dependences, and absolute values. It is found that the maximum cross section for formation of the adenine and guanine positive ions is reached at about 90 eV energy of the electron beam and their absolute values are equal to 2.8 × 10(-15) and 3.2 × 10(-15) cm(2), respectively. The total cross section for formation of the negative ions is 6.1 × 10(-18) and 7.6 × 10(-18) cm(2) at the energy of 1.1 eV for adenine and guanine, respectively. The absolute cross-section values for the molecular ions are measured and the cross-sections of dissociative ionization are determined. Quantum chemical calculations are performed for the studied molecules, ions and fragments for interpretation of the crossed beams experiments.
Time-dependent density functional theory with linear and quadratic response technology is used to calculate electronic structure, spectra, and spin-orbit coupling effects for analysis of the main mechanism for phosphorescence of the recently synthesized iridium complex [bis(2-phenylpyridine)(2-carboxy-4-dimethylaminopyridine)iridium(III)]. This compound exhibits strong green phosphorescence which is used in solution processable organic light-emitting diode devices (OLEDs) to overcome the efficiency limit imposed by the formation of triplet excitons. Attempting to foresee new structure-property relations that can guide an improved design of OLED devices based on phosphorescence of the lowest triplet state, we have conducted a theoretical analysis of the photophysical properties of a series of iridium cyclometalated complexes.
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