Efficient photodeactivation mechanism in an unnatural nucleic acid base.

5-aza-7-deazaguanine (5N7C-G), also known as P, is an unnatural nucleic acid base (NAB) closely related in structure to the natural NAB guanine. It forms a Watson-Crick base pair with the unnatural NAB Z synthesized by Benner and co-workers. We study the ultrafast decay pathways for this modified NAB with high-level multireference methods.

Machine learning modeling of electronic spectra and thermodynamic stability for a comprehensive chemical space of melanin.

Melanin as a bio-optoelectronic material holds immense potential. However, the understanding of its exact molecular structure has been stalling for decades due to difficulties in experiments, which hinders uncovering its structure-property relationship. Conventional theoretical modeling is also limited due to the huge size of its chemical space resulting from millions of possible oligomer structures.

Elucidating the Structure of Melanin and Its Structure-Property Correlation.

ConspectusMelanin, specifically eumelanin, is a brownish-black pigment abundant in nature. It is a heterogeneous biopolymer known most commonly for its spectacular photoprotection property in humans, animals, and plants. Numerous other properties of eumelanin have recently been identified, including radical scavenging, thermal regulation, charge transport, etc.

Unraveling the Geometrical Effects on Singlet Fission of Carotenoids: A Model Perspective.

Singlet fission (SF) is a phenomenon that generates multiple excitons (triplets) on different chromophores from a single exciton (singlet) on one chromophore. Owing to the strong electronic correlation and a complicated excited state manifold of carotenoids (polyenes), the SF mechanism in carotenoids is different from acenes shown in , , , 6800-6805. However, the mechanism is expected to have significant effects of the geometry in the excited state and strong vibronic couplings between these low-lying excited states.

Hybrid Unsupervised/Supervised Machine Learning for Identifying Molecular Structural Fingerprints From Ensemble Property.

The ensemble properties of a system are obtained by averaging over the properties calculated for the various configurations it can have at a finite temperature and thus cannot be captured by a single molecular structure. Such ensemble properties are often important in material discovery. In designing new materials, the goal is to predict those ensemble structures that display a tailored property.

Photophysics of Nitro-Substituted Unnatural Nucleic Acid Base.

The unnatural nucleic acid base (uNAB), 6-amino-3-methyl-5-nitropyridin-2(1H)one, often referred to as can form a base pair with the uNAB 2-aminoimidazo[1,2-]-1,3,5-triazin-4(8H)-one (referred to as P) and is analogous to a guanine-cytosine (G-C) pair. However, it is well-known that the nonradiative decay pathway of the P-Z pair is significantly different from that of the G-C pair (Cui et al., , , 605117-605125).

External photocatalyst-free photocycloaddition between triplet vinylnitrenes with 1,3-biradical character and activated olefins under 420 nm LEDs.

Herein, we report that triplet vinylnitrenes with 1,3-biradical character can directly participate in photocycloaddition reactions with olefins to produce single diastereomers of the corresponding 1-pyrrolines under 420 nm LEDs in acetonitrile solvent. Moreover, a one-pot method has been developed to produce pyrroles directly through photocycloaddition and oxidation sequences. The excited state of the substrate olefin can sensitize vinyl azide energy transfer, eliminating the need for an external photocatalyst or sensitizer.

Photosensitizer-Free Photoinduced Ground-State Triplet Carbene-Assisted Persistent Aryloxy Radical Generation via Hydrogen Atom Transfer.

The traditional intermolecular O-H insertion strategy is typically associated with the reactivity exhibited by the singlet spin state, or it can alter the spin state from triplet to singlet by hydrogen bonding. Herein, we report diazoarylidene succinimide that generates a persistent ground-state triplet carbene under visible light (Blue LED, 456 nm) without a photosensitizer. This triplet carbene undergoes an intramolecular O-H insertion via hydrogen atom transfer, forming a persistent aryloxy radical without altering its spin state and leading to biologically relevant 2-chromenes.

A nine-ring fused terrylene diimide exhibits switching between red TADF and near-IR room temperature phosphorescence.

Herein, we report the first example of a terrylene diimide derivative that switches emission between thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) and room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) in the red region. By design, the molecule TDI-cDBT boasts a symmetrical, consecutively fused nine-ring motif with a kite-like structure. The rigid core formed by the annulated dibenzothiophene moiety favoured efficient intersystem crossing and yielded a narrow-band emission with a full-width half maxima (FWHM) of 0.

Understanding the Photoprocesses in Biological Systems: Need for Accurate Multireference Treatment.

Light-matter interaction is crucial to life itself and revolves around many of the central processes in biology. The need for understanding these photochemical and photophysical processes cannot be overemphasized. Interaction of light with biological systems starts with the absorption of light and subsequent phenomena that occur in the excited states of the system.

Conformational Effects on the Absorption Spectra of Phytochromes.

Bacteriophytochrome is a photoreceptor protein that contains the biliverdin (BV) chromophore as its active component. The spectra of BV upon mutation remain remarkably unchanged, as far as spectral positions are concerned. This points toward the minimal effect of electrostatic effects on the electronic structure of the chromophore.

Structure prediction from spectra amidst dynamical heterogeneity in melanin.

Melanin is a biopolymer pigment that plays a central role in skin photoprotection. Its extensive chemical and dynamical heterogeneity imparts this property through a broad featureless ultraviolet/visible absorption spectrum. Conventionally, the rational design of synthetic photoprotective pigments revolves around establishing the structure-spectra correlation and developing biomimetic materials with desired optical properties.

Machine Learning the Quantum Mechanical Wave Function.

Strongly correlated systems have been challenging to computational chemists for a long time. To solve these systems, multireference methods have been developed over the years. Recently, with the fast development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, these methods have also influenced the quest for optimal wave function ansatz.

Eliminating all bonds from the ground state gives rise to ionic bonding in high-spin states of heterodiatomics.

Understanding chemical bonding in second-row diatomics has been central to elucidating the basics of bonding itself. Bond strength and the number of bonds are the two factors that decide the reactivity of molecules. While bond strengths have been theoretically computed accurately and experimentally determined, the number of bonds is a more contentious issue, especially for complicated multi-reference systems like C.

Efficient Machine Learning Configuration Interaction for Bond Breaking Problems.

Machine learning-assisted configuration interaction (MLCI) has been shown earlier as a promising method in determining the electronic structure of the model and molecular Hamiltonians. In the MLCI approach to molecular Hamiltonians, it has been noticed that prediction is strongly dependent on the connectedness of the training and validation spaces. In this work, we have tested three different models with different output parameters (abs-MLCI, transformed-MLCI, and log-MLCI) to verify the robustness of training these models.

Machine learning matrix product state ansatz for strongly correlated systems.

Machine learning (ML) has been used to optimize the matrix product state (MPS) ansatz for the wavefunction of strongly correlated systems. The ML optimization of MPS has been tested for the Heisenberg Hamiltonian on one-dimensional and ladder lattices, which correspond to conjugated molecular systems. The input descriptors and output for the supervised ML are lattice configurations and configuration interaction coefficients, respectively.

Active Learning Assisted MCCI to Target Spin States.

Strongly correlated systems and their accurate solutions have been challenging to quantum chemistry. Several methods have been developed over the years for the accurate understanding of such systems, and selected configuration interaction and Monte Carlo configuration interaction (MCCI) form important classes of systems in this category. However, MCCI is plagued by slow convergence.

Curious Case of Singlet Triplet Gaps in Nonlinear Polyaromatic Hydrocarbons.

The singlet triplet (ST) gap of linear polyacenes decays exponentially with the system size as a result of extended conjugation and reducing highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO)-lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) gaps. These low ST gaps can ideally be leveraged toward energy applications but are hindered by the decreasing stability of the systems. Thus, there is the need to understand the ST gap of nonlinear polyacenes, which are markedly more stable than their linear counterparts.

Mechanism of Singlet Fission in Carotenoids from a Polyene Model System.

Singlet fission (SF) is the process of formation of multiple excitons (triplet) from a locally excited singlet state. The mechanism of SF in polyacenes has been shown to proceed via a charge transfer intermediate state. However, carotenoids are not understood in the context of SF.

Substitution enables significant new decay channels for a non-canonical amino acid.

UV-Vis absorption spectra and emission peaks of indole and 7-fluoroindole are measured and it is observed that 7-fluoroindole quenches the fluorescence signals significantly compared to indole. This observation is elucidated reconstruction of the potential energy surfaces, determination of the conical intersections, and dynamical studies. It is observed that a single fluorine substitution on indole leads to the appearance of several accessible low-energy conical intersections that cause fast nonradiative decay.

Data-driven modeling of S → S excitation energy in the BODIPY chemical space: High-throughput computation, quantum machine learning, and inverse design.

Derivatives of BODIPY are popular fluorophores due to their synthetic feasibility, structural rigidity, high quantum yield, and tunable spectroscopic properties. While the characteristic absorption maximum of BODIPY is at 2.5 eV, combinations of functional groups and substitution sites can shift the peak position by ±1 eV.

Radiationless Decay Processes of an Unnatural DNA Base: Pyrrole 2-Carbaldehyde.

Pyrrole-2-carbaldehyde (Pa) forms one of the unnatural nucleic acid bases, and as a base pair with 7-(2-thienyl)imidazo[4,5-]pyridine (Ds), it has been known to be stable in DNA. The Ds-Pa pair is stabilized in DNA via van der Waals' interaction and shape fitting. There are some studies on the origin of its stability and reactivity in the ground state.

Electron Attachment to Cytosine: The Role of Water.

We present an EOM-CCSD-based quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) study on the electron attachment process to solvated cytosine. The electron attachment in the bulk solvated cytosine occurs through a doorway mechanism, where the initial electron is localized on water. The electron is subsequently transferred to cytosine by the mixing of electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom, which occurs on an ultrafast time scale.

Configuration interaction trained by neural networks: Application to model polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

The main bottleneck of a stochastic or deterministic configuration interaction method is determining the relative weights or importance of each determinant or configuration, which requires large scale matrix diagonalization. Therefore, these methods can be improved significantly from a computational standpoint if the relative importance of each configuration in the ground and excited states of molecular/model systems can be learned using machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANNs). We have used neural networks to train the configuration interaction coefficients obtained from full configuration interaction and Monte Carlo configuration interaction methods and have tested different input descriptors and outputs to find the more efficient training techniques.