N,C-chelate organoboron compounds are widely employed as photoresponsive and optoelectronic materials due to their efficient photochromic reactivity. It was found in experiments that two diphenyl-substituted organoboron compounds, namely B(ppy)Ph2 (ppy=2-phenylpyridyl) and B(iba)Ph2 (iba=N-isopropylbenzylideneamine), show distinct photochemical reactivity. B(ppy)Ph2 is inert on irradiation, whereas B(iba)Ph2 undergoes photoinduced transformations, yielding BN-cyclohepta-1,3,5-triene via a borirane intermediate. In this work, the complete active space self-consistent field and its second-order perturbation (CASPT2//CASSCF) methods were used to investigate the photoinduced reaction mechanisms of B(ppy)Ph2 and B(iba)Ph2 . The calculations showed that the two compounds isomerize to borirane in the same way by passing a transition state in the S1 state and a conical intersection between the S1 and S0 states. The energy barriers in the S1 state of 0.54 and 0.26 eV for B(ppy)Ph2 and B(iba)Ph2 , respectively, were explained by analyzing the charge distributions of minima in S0 and S1 states. The results provide helpful insights into the excited-state dynamics of organoboron compounds, which could assist in rational design of boron-based photoresponsive materials.
Keywords: ab initio calculations; boron; isomerization; photochemistry; reaction mechanisms.
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