Excited State Exchange Control of Photoinduced Electron Spin Polarization in Electronic Ground States

Ground-state electron spin polarization (ESP) is generated in radical elaborated (bpy)Pt(CAT-NN) and (bpy)Pt(CAT-p-Me2PhMe2-NN) (bpy = 5,5′-di-tert-butyl-2,2′-bipyridine, CAT = 3-tert-butylcatecholate, p-Ph = para-phenylene, NN = nitronylnitroxide). Photoexcitation produces an exchange-coupled, three-spin, charge-separated doublet 2S1 (S = chromophore excited spin singlet configuration) excited state that rapidly decays to a 2T1 (T = chromophore excited spin triplet configuration) excited state. The SQ-bridge-NN bond torsions affect the magnitude of the excited state exchange interaction (JSQ-NN), which determines the 2T1–4T1 energy gap. Ground state ESP is dependent on the magnitude of JSQ-NN, and we postulate that this results from differences in 2T1 and 4T1 state mixing. Mechanisms that lead to the rapid transfer of the excited state ESP to the ground state are discussed. Although subnanosecond 2T1 state lifetimes are measured optically in solution, the ground state ESP decays very slowly at 20 K and is observable for more than a millisecond.