Predicting aromatic exciplex fluorescence emission energies.

PAH dimerization has been widely posited to play an important, even rate-determining role in soot nucleation, despite scanty experimental evidence of the existence of PAH dimers in flames. Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) offers a promising in situ method of identifying PAH dimers, if dimer fluorescence can be distinguished from the fluorescence of the constituent monomers and other species present. Predicting transition energies for excited dimers (excimers) and excited complexes (exciplexes) represents a significant challenge for theory. Nonempirically tuned LC-BLYP functionals have been used to compute excited-state geometries and emission energies for a database of 81 inter- and intramolecular PAH excimers and exciplexes. Exciplex emission energies depend sensitively on the topology of the PAHs involved, but a linear relationship between the mean monomer bandgap and the computed exciplex emission means that dimer electronic properties can be predicted based on the properties of the constituent monomers. The range of fluorescence energies calculated for structures containing small to moderately-sized PAHs indicates that either noncovalent or aliphatically-linked complexes could generate the visible-range fluorescence energies observed in LIF experiments.

Exciplex Stabilization in Asymmetric Acene Dimers.

Excimers play an important role in photochemical processes ranging from singlet fission to DNA damage, and the characteristic red-shift in fluorescence spectra associated with excimer formation can provide information about aggregate formation and the orientation of chromophores. When a mixture of chromophores is present, exciplex formation may lead to spectral characteristics distinct from those of either monomer or the corresponding excimers. To predict the effects of aggregation in a system containing a mixture of small acenes, binding energies and minimum-energy geometries have been calculated for three mixed S1 exciplexes. Benchmark CASSCF/NEVPT2 multireference binding energies of 18.2, 27.7, and 49.3 kJ/mol are reported for the benzene-naphthalene, benzene-anthracene, and naphthalene-anthracene exciplexes, respectively. TDDFT calculations have been performed using a range of exchange-correlation functionals, showing that many functionals perform inconsistently, and the error in binding energy often depends on the character of the monomer excitation from which the exciplex state is derived. Moderate exciplex stabilization observed for the benzene-naphthalene and naphthalene-anthracene exciplexes results from a mixture of charge transfer and exciton delocalization.

Mechanism of Efficient Proton Conduction in Diphosphoric Acid Elucidated via First-Principles Simulation and NMR.

Diphosphoric acid (H4P2O7) is the first condensation product of phosphoric acid (H3PO4), the compound with the highest intrinsic proton conductivity in the liquid state. It exists at higher temperature (T > 200 °C) and lower relative humidity (RH ≈ 0.01%) and shows significant ionic conductivity under these conditions. In this work, ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of a pure H4P2O7 model system and NMR spectroscopy on nominal H4P2O7 (which contains significant amounts of ortho- and triphosphoric acid in thermodynamic equilibrium) were performed to reveal the nature and underlying mechanisms of the ionic conductivity. The central oxygen of the molecule is found to be excluded from any hydrogen bonding, which has two interesting consequences: (i) compared to H3PO4, the acidity of H4P2O7 is severely increased, and (ii) the condensation reaction only leads to a minor decrease in hydrogen bond network frustration, which is thought to be one of the features enabling high proton conductivity. A topological analysis of diphosphoric acid's hydrogen bond network shows remarkable similarities to that of phosphonic acid (H3PO3). The hydrogen bonding facilitates protonic polarization fluctuations (Zundel polarization) extending over several molecules (Grotthuss chains), the other important ingredient for efficient structural diffusion of protons. At T = 160 °C, this is estimated to make a conductivity contribution of about 0.1 S/cm, which accounts for half of the total ionic conductivity (σ ≈ 0.2 S/cm). The other half is suggested to result from diffusion of charged phosphate species (vehicle mechanism) that are present in high concentration, resembling conduction in ionic liquids.

Centrality measures highlight proton traps and access points to proton highways in kinetic Monte Carlo trajectories.

A centrality measure based on the time of first returns rather than the number of steps is developed and applied to finding proton traps and access points to proton highways in the doped perovskite oxides: AZr(0.875)D(0.125)O3, where A is Ba or Sr and the dopant D is Y or Al. The high centrality region near the dopant is wider in the SrZrO3 systems than the BaZrO3 systems. In the aluminum-doped systems, a region of intermediate centrality (secondary region) is found in a plane away from the dopant. Kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) trajectories show that this secondary region is an entry to fast conduction planes in the aluminum-doped systems in contrast to the highest centrality area near the dopant trap. The yttrium-doped systems do not show this secondary region because the fast conduction routes are in the same plane as the dopant and hence already in the high centrality trapped area. This centrality measure complements kMC by highlighting key areas in trajectories. The limiting activation barriers found via kMC are in very good agreement with experiments and related to the barriers to escape dopant traps.