Synthesis and optical properties of all-trans-oligodiacetylenes

A new series of pure and highly soluble oligodiacetylenes (ODAs) was synthesized in high yield and on a multi-milligram scale by a sequence of Sonogashira reactions with a strongly reduced level of homocoupling. The lambda(max) and epsilon(max) of these ODAs show an increase with both chain elongation and solvent polarity. A plot of absorption versus 1/CL (CL = conjugation length) was shown to be linear. The lambda(max) converges to 435 nm for the longest members of the series at micromolar concentration. This reveals that the longest wavelength absorption observed for PDA chains (lambda(max) up to 700 nm) is due to aggregation effects. The fluorescence quantum yield increased from monomer to trimer and decreased for longer ODAs. A similar trend is found for the lifetime of fluorescence with a maximum of 600 ps for the trimer. The observed linearity of the rotational correlation time with the oligomer length implies that the ODA chains in solution lack significant geometrical changes. This implies that the ODAs in solution are fully stretched molecular rods of up to 4 nm in length.