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Updated: Aug 18, 2026

Proton Transfer and Protein Conformation Dynamics in Photosensitive Proteins by Time-resolved Step-scan Fourier-transform Infrared Spectroscopy
Published on: June 27, 2014
Excited-state proton transfer: from constrained systems to "super" photoacids to superfast proton transfer
Laren M Tolbert1, Kyril M Solntsev
1School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0400, USA.
Abstract:
We have used knowledge of the electronic structure of excited states of acids to design molecules that exhibit enhanced excited-state acidity. Such "super" photoacids are the strongest reversible photoacids known and allow the time evolution of proton transfer to be examined in a wide array of organic solvents. This includes breaking/formation of the hydrogen bonds in hundreds of femtoseconds, solvent reorientation and relaxation in picoseconds, proton dissociation, and, finally, diffusion and geminate recombination of the dissociated proton, observed in nanoseconds.
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