Quantifying Entatic States in Photophysical Processes: Applications to Copper Photosensitizers

The entatic or rack-induced state is a core concept in bioinorganic chemistry. In its simplest form, it is present when a protein scaffold places a transition metal ion and its first coordination sphere into an energized geometric and electronic structure that differs significantly from that of the relaxed form. This energized complex can exhibit special properties. Under this purview, however, entatic states are hardly unique to bioinorganic chemistry, and their effects can be found throughout a variety of important chemistries and materials science applications. Despite this broad influence, there are only a few examples where entatic effects have been quantified. Here we extend the entatic concept more generally to photophysical processes by developing a combined experimental and computational methodology to quantify entatic states across an entire class of functional molecules, e.g., Cu-based photosensitizers. These metal complexes have a broad range of applications, including solar electricity generation, solar fuels synthesis, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), and photoredox catalysis. As a direct consequence of quantifying entatic states, this methodology allows the disentanglement of steric and electronic contributions to excited state dynamics. Thus, before embarking on the syntheses of new Cu-based photosensitizers, the correlations described herein can be used as an estimate of entatic and electronic contributions and thus guide ligand design and the development of next-generation transition metal complexes with improved or tailored excited state dynamics. Lastly, entatic energies in some Cu photosensitizers are the largest yet quantified and are found here to approach 20 kcal/mol relative to the conformationally flexible [Cu(phen)₂]⁺. These energetics are significant relative to typical chemical driving forces and barriers, highlighting the utility in extending entatic state descriptors to new classes of molecules and materials with interesting functional properties involving the coupling between electron and vibrational dynamics.