Solar Photochemistry Breakthrough Reported by Beratan Group

Professor Beratan’s group has just reported a new mechanism for spin-forbidden excitation energy transfer, a process of great significance in solar photochemistry.  The group finds that spin forbidden electronic energy transfer, known as Dexter energy transfer, may be mediated by excited states of the bridge linking an electronically excited donor to an acceptor group (indicated by the blue and green squares in the diagram), rather than by charge-transfer states of the system (indicated by the gray and oranges squares in the diagram) as had been believed previously. The study is reported in the Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) here.