Structural, photophysical, and theoretical studies of imidazole-based excited-state intramolecular proton transfer...

Imidazole-based excited state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT) blue fluorescent molecules, 2-(1-(4-chlorophenyl)-4,5-diphenyl-1H-imidazol-2-yl)phenol (BHPI-Cl) and 2-(1-(4-bromophenyl)-4,5-diphenyl-1H-imidazol-2-yl)phenol (BHPI-Br) were designed and synthesized by Debus-Radziszewski method through a one-pot multicomponent reaction in high yield. The synthesized compounds were fully characterized by ¹H NMR, ¹³C NMR, FT-IR, FT-Raman, GC-Mass, and elemental analysis. The molecular structures in single crystal lattice were studied by X-ray crystallographic analysis. Because of the intramolecular hydrogen bonding, hydroxyphenyl group is planar to the central imidazole ring, while the other phenyl rings gave distorted conformations to the central heterocyclic ring. BHPI-Cl and BHPI-Br molecules showed intense ESIPT fluorescence at 480nm, because the two twisted phenyl rings on 4- and 5-positions have reduced intermolecular interaction between adjacent molecules in each crystal through a head-to-tail packing manner. Quantum chemical calculations of energies were carried out by (TD-)DFT using B3LYP/6-31G(d, p) basis set to predict the electronic absorption spectra of the compounds, and they showed good agreement between the computational and the experimental values. The thermal analyses of the synthesized molecules were also carried out by TGA/DSC method.