Exothermic rate restrictions in long-range photoinduced charge separations in rigid media

Glycerol/methanol (9:1) mixtures at 255 K behave as rigid media for photoinduced electron transfers that take place within a few hundred nanoseconds. This media also provides enough polarity and plasticity to accommodate charge separations with reaction free energies ranging from +3 to -34 kcal/mol. The distance dependence of the electron transfer rates from electronically excited aromatic hydrocarbons to nitriles in this medium is accurately described by an exponential decay constant of 1.65 per angstrom. These photoinduced electron transfers display, for the first time in charge separations between independent electron donors and acceptors, a free-energy relationship with a maximum rate followed by a decrease in the rate for more exothermic reactions. According to this free-energy relationship, Franck-Condon factors are maximized at DeltaG(0) approximately -15 kcal/mol. It is suggested that the inverted region observed for these first-order photoinduced charge separations originates from a slower increase of their reorganization energies with DeltaG(0) than that of the analogous second-order photoinduced charge separations, for which inverted regions have never been clearly observed.