New paper in J. Phys. Chem. C

Having a new paper out is always fun and this week we got the wonderful news from the Journal of Physical Chemistry C that a paper I co authored with Prof. Alireza Badiei at the University of Tehran in Iran and his student, who actually got us all in touch, Dr. Pezhman Zarabadi-Poor, was accepted for publication.

The paper is titled “Selective Optical Sensing of Hg(II) in Aqueous Media by H-Acid/SBA-15: A Combined Experimental and Theoretical Study“; in it we explored the fluorescence quenching mechanism for a Hg(II) complex which forms the basis of a novel selective mercury detector. Geometry optimizations were carried out at the PBE0/6-31++G** PCM level of theory (along with the aug-cc-pVDZ-PP basis set and corresponding ECP for Hg), also the electronic spectrum of both the free acid and the Hg(II) complex was calculated.

(Frontier orbitals were depicted using Chemcraft)

We can observe that HOMO and LUMO+1 are mainly located on the naphtalene ring allowing for the S0 -> S1 transition and back, which accounts for the molecular fluorescence. Other internal conversion processes were also assessed and discussed in the paper which accounts for the quenching effect. In short, we have obtained a full quantum description of the mechanism by which coordination of the free acid to Hg(II) alters the ligand’s electronic structure converting its emisive lowest-lying excited state to a dark state, i.e., quenching! Pretty cool stuff!

Once again thanks to both Dr. Zarabadi-Poor and Prof. Badiei for thinking about me for collaborating with them in this joint endeavor which hopefully wont be our last. A PDF copy of the article is available by direct request through this post.

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