Non-Kasha fluorescence of pyrene emerges from a dynamic equilibrium between excited states

Pyrene fluorescence after a high-energy electronic excitation exhibits a prominent band shoulder not present after excitation at low energies. The standard assignment of this shoulder as a non-Kasha emission from the second-excited state (S₂) has been recently questioned. To elucidate this issue, we simulated the fluorescence of pyrene using two different theoretical approaches based on vertical convolution and nonadiabatic dynamics with nuclear ensembles. To conduct the necessary nonadiabatic dynamics simulations with high-lying electronic states and deal with fluorescence timescales of about 100 ns of this large molecule, we developed new computational protocols. The results from both approaches confirm that the band shoulder is, in fact, due to S₂ emission. We show that the non-Kasha behavior is a dynamic-equilibrium effect not caused by a metastable S₂ minimum. However, it requires considerable vibrational energy, which can only be achieved in collisionless regimes after transitions into highly excited states. This strict condition explains why the S₂ emission was not observed in some experiments.