| 1. |
- Yang, Jie, et al.
(författare)
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Direct observation of ultrafast hydrogen bond strengthening in liquid water
- 2021
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 596:7873
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Water is one of the most important, yet least understood, liquids in nature. Many anomalous properties of liquid water originate from its well-connected hydrogen bond network, including unusually efficient vibrational energy redistribution and relaxation2. An accurate description of the ultrafast vibrational motion of water molecules is essential for understanding the nature of hydrogen bonds and many solution-phase chemical reactions. Most existing knowledge of vibrational relaxation in water is built upon ultrafast spectroscopy experiments. However, these experiments cannot directly resolve the motion of the atomic positions and require difficult translation of spectral dynamics into hydrogen bond dynamics. Here, we measure the ultrafast structural response to the excitation of the OH stretching vibration in liquid water with femtosecond temporal and atomic spatial resolution using liquid ultrafast electron scattering. We observed a transient hydrogen bond contraction of roughly 0.04 Å on a timescale of 80 femtoseconds, followed by a thermalization on a timescale of approximately 1 picosecond. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal the need to treat the distribution of the shared proton in the hydrogen bond quantum mechanically to capture the structural dynamics on femtosecond timescales. Our experiment and simulations unveil the intermolecular character of the water vibration preceding the relaxation of the OH stretch.
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| 2. |
- Kunnus, Kristjan, et al.
(författare)
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Chemical control of competing electron transfer pathways in iron tetracyano-polypyridyl photosensitizers
- 2020
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Ingår i: Chemical Science. - : ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY. - 2041-6520 .- 2041-6539. ; 11:17, s. 4360-4373
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Photoinduced intramolecular electron transfer dynamics following metal-to-ligand charge-transfer (MLCT) excitation of [Fe(CN)(4)(2,2 '-bipyridine)](2-) (1), [Fe(CN)(4)(2,3-bis(2-pyridyl)pyrazine)](2-) (2) and [Fe(CN)(4)(2,2 '-bipyrimidine)](2-) (3) were investigated in various solvents with static and time-resolved UV-Visible absorption spectroscopy and Fe 2p3d resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS). This series of polypyridyl ligands, combined with the strong solvatochromism of the complexes, enables the (MLCT)-M-1 vertical energy to be varied from 1.64 eV to 2.64 eV and the (MLCT)-M-3 lifetime to range from 180 fs to 67 ps. The (MLCT)-M-3 lifetimes in 1 and 2 decrease exponentially as the MLCT energy increases, consistent with electron transfer to the lowest energy triplet metal-centred ((MC)-M-3) excited state, as established by the Tanabe-Sugano analysis of the Fe 2p3d RIXS data. In contrast, the (MLCT)-M-3 lifetime in 3 changes non-monotonically with MLCT energy, exhibiting a maximum. This qualitatively distinct behaviour results from a competing (MLCT)-M-3 -> ground state (GS) electron transfer pathway that exhibits energy gap law behaviour. The (MLCT)-M-3 -> GS pathway involves nuclear tunnelling for the high-frequency polypyridyl breathing mode (h nu = 1530 cm(-1)), which is most displaced for complex 3, making this pathway significantly more efficient. Our study demonstrates that the excited state relaxation mechanism of Fe polypyridyl photosensitizers can be readily tuned by ligand and solvent environment. Furthermore, our study reveals that extending charge transfer lifetimes requires control of the relative energies of the (MLCT)-M-3 and the (MC)-M-3 states and suppression of the intramolecular distortion of the acceptor ligand in the (MLCT)-M-3 excited state.
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