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Excited-State Symmetry Breaking and the Laporte Rule

Published inJournal of Physical Chemistry Letters, vol. 12, p. 4067-4071
Publication date2021
Abstract

Excited-state symmetry breaking (ES-SB) is common to a large number of multibranched electron donor−acceptor (DA) molecules in polar environments. During this process, the electronic excitation, originally evenly distributed over the molecule, localizes, at least partially, on one branch. Due to the absence of an unambiguous spectroscopic signature in the UV−vis region, electronic transient absorption (TA) has not been the method of choice for real-time observation of this phenomenon. Herein, we demonstrate that the Laporte rule, which states that one-photon transitions conserving parity are forbidden in centrosymmetric molecules, provides such clear signature of ES-SB in electronic TA spectroscopy. Using a dicyanoanthracene-based D−A−D dye, we show that transitions from the S1 state of this molecule, which are initially Laporte forbidden, become allowed upon ES-SB. This leads to the rise of new TA bands, whose intensity provides a direct measure of the extent of asymmetry in the excited state.

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SZAKACS, Zoltan, VAUTHEY, Eric. Excited-State Symmetry Breaking and the Laporte Rule. In: Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2021, vol. 12, p. 4067–4071. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00893
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Additional URL for this publicationhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00893
Journal ISSN1948-7185
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