Reconstruction of the Molecular Structure of a Multichromophoric System Using Single-Molecule Defocused Wide-Field Imaging

Sujin Ham; Jaesung Yang; Felix Schlosser; Frank Würthner; Dongho Kim

doi:10.1021/jz501233d

Reconstruction of the Molecular Structure of a Multichromophoric System Using Single-Molecule Defocused Wide-Field Imaging

J Phys Chem Lett. 2014 Aug 21;5(16):2830-5. doi: 10.1021/jz501233d. Epub 2014 Aug 5.

Authors

Sujin Ham¹, Jaesung Yang¹, Felix Schlosser², Frank Würthner², Dongho Kim¹

Affiliations

¹ †Spectroscopy Laboratory for Functional π-Electronic Systems and Department of Chemistry, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea.
² ‡Institut für Organische Chemie and Center for Nanosystems Chemistry, Universität Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany.

PMID: 26278086
DOI: 10.1021/jz501233d

Abstract

Single-molecule defocused wide-field imaging (DWFI) has been demonstrated to be useful to determine molecular structure parameters, such as the orientations of transition dipole moments and the angular relationships between chromophores in multichromophoric molecular systems. For a series of acetylene-linked perylene bisimide (PBI) macrocycles with different ring size comprising three to six PBI dyes, we reconstructed the molecular structure of the multichromophoric system using DWFI method. Furthermore, we revealed that the structural heterogeneities and distortions depend on the ring size. Our findings illustrate the use of DWFI to gain deeper insight into the structure-property relationships of artificial light-harvesting molecular systems.

Keywords: defocused imaging; macrocycles; molecular structure; photochemistry; single-molecule spectroscopy.