Photochemistry

A recent study led by Zoltan Szakacs and Eric Vauthey from the University of Geneva explores excited-state symmetry breaking in donor-acceptor-donor systems. The associated paper just appeared in PCCP: Excited-state symmetry breaking in 9,10-dicyanoanthracene-based quadrupolar molecules: the effect of donor-acceptor branch length

The main idea behind this work is to use symmetry-selection rules and the associated forbidden transitions to probe how inversion symmetry is broken during the photodynamics. See [JPCL 2021, 12, 4067] for an initial discussion of the idea.

A new paper on the photochemistry of fingerprinting reagents, led by L. Hunnisett and P. Goddard at Loughborough, just appeared in J. Chem. Phys.: Mechanistic Insight into the Fluorescence Activity of Forensic Fingerprinting Reagents. The paper investigates the reason for the different fluorescent activities observed in chemically related fingerprinting reagents.