Computational Study on the Effect of Thienyl π-Donor on the Optical Response of Nonclassical...

Computational analyses were performed on nitrogen-rich oligothiadizolothiophenes TT (n = 0-3) and their four π-donor-substituted derivatives Th-TT (n = 0-3) to examine the optical response due to geometrical and electronic structural attributes in the longitudinal and transverse axes, respectively. Our results are understood in the context of greater conjugation in the longitudinal axis (via additional fused rings) and substitution of a thienyl π-donor in the transverse axis of the geometry of each derivative. On inspection of the frontier molecular orbitals, we found that the better electron-accepting ability with minimal sacrifice in the ionization potentials results from geometrical aspects in both longitudinal and transverse axes. Due to the narrowed highest occupied molecular orbital-lowest unoccupied molecular orbital gaps, all of the derivatives exhibit a biradicaloid character (BRC) and one-photon panchromatic absorption; however, the open-shell nature weakened the charge transfer characteristics of excitation. In both the series, the odd electron density distributions and electron localization plots amply demonstrate the weakening of ylide character in fused thiophene rings and clearly indicate to the emergence of a long-bond/single BRC in the sulfurdimithide moiety in both series. In addition, the estimated tensor components of the second hyperpolarizability as well as overall responses confirm the shift from the longitudinal to transverse axis following the substitution with the π-donor. Interestingly, the TPA cross sections show comparable behavior, but contrary to γ, π-donor thienyl substitution appears to be discouraging in getting higher TPA responses for higher homologous series. Therefore, this study opens a new conjecture on tuning better nonlinear optical properties of organic functional materials.