Assembled triphenylamine bis-urea macrocycles: exploring photodriven electron transfer from host to guests

Absorption of electronic acceptors in the accessible channels of an assembled triphenylamine (TPA) bis-urea macrocycle 1 enabled the study of electron transfer from the walls of the TPA framework to the encapsulated guests. The TPA host is isoskeletal in all host-guest structures analyzed with guests 2,1,3-benzothiadiazole, 2,5-dichlorobenzoquinone and I₂ loading in single-crystal-to-single-crystal transformations. Analysis of the crystal structures highlights how the spatial proximity and orientation of the TPA host and the entrapped guests influence their resulting photophysical properties and allow direct comparison of the different donor-acceptor complexes. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy shows that upon complex formation 1·2,5-dichlorobenzoquinone exhibits a charge transfer (CT) transition. Whereas, the 1·2,1,3-benzothiadiazole complex undergoes a photoinduced electron transfer (PET) upon irradiation with 365 nm LEDs. The CT absorptions were also identified with the aid of time dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) calculations. Cyclic voltammetry experiments show that 2,1,3-benzothiadiazole undergoes reversible reduction within the host-guest complex. Moreover, the optical band gaps of the host 1·2,5-dichlorobenzoquinone (1.66 eV), and host 1·2,1,3-benzothiadiazole (2.15 eV) complexes are significantly smaller as compared to the free host 1 material (3.19 eV). Overall, understanding this supramolecular electron transfer strategy should pave the way towards designing lower band gap inclusion complexes.