A phenomenological scheme for reversed quartet mechanism of electron spin polarization in covalently linked systems of chromophore and free radical: Determination of magnitude of polarization and application to pyrene-TEMPO linked molecules

Generation of electron spin polarization (ESP) during the bimolecular quenching of an excited chromophore by a free radical is generally explained by the radical-triplet pair mechanism, which is capable of giving the magnitudes of ESP arising from the quenching of the singlet or the triplet excited chromophore. When the chromophore and the free radical are covalently linked, although there are several mechanisms to explain the observed spin-polarized electron paramagnetic resonance signals under a variety of experimental conditions and in different chromophore-radical systems, there are no schemes that allow quantitative determination of the magnitude of ESP. In this work, we present a phenomenological scheme with this objective. In this scheme, we have incorporated several concepts of the reversed quartet mechanism of Rozenshtein et al. [J. Phys. Chem. A 109, 11144 (2005)] to our phenomenological sequential quenching scheme [V. Rane and R. Das, J. Phys. Chem. A 119, 5515 (2015)] of ESP in covalently linked chromophore-radical systems. This phenomenological reversed quartet scheme is able to explain the observed inversion of ESP with time and can also give a quantitative measure of the absorptive and emissive ESP in such systems. We have applied this scheme to the photophysical quenching of a series of newly synthesized pyrene-TEMPO molecules, where a spacer group of different lengths covalently links the pyrene chromophore and the TEMPO free radical. Given the simplicity of our scheme, reasonable estimates of the magnitudes of the ESP have been obtained in all cases. Published under license by AIP Publishing.