Excited State Dynamics of Dibenzothiophene Derivatives

Polycyclic aromatic sulfur heterocycles are environmental pollutants formed from incomplete combustion processes and crude oil spills. Their excited state dynamics are not understood. Herein, femtosecond transient absorption is combined with steady-state spectroscopy and computational methods to elucidate the relaxation mechanisms of three dibenzothiophene derivatives. The low-energy singlet and triplet states all have ππ* character in the Franck-Condon region, and two minima were located in the S₁ surface. Excitation at 320 nm populates their S₁ state directly, which relaxes with lifetimes ranging from 4 to 13 ps. Most of the S₁ population undergoes efficient intersystem crossing to the triplet state with lifetimes ranging from 820 ± 50 to 900 ± 30 ps. The compounds exhibit negligible nonradiative internal conversion, low fluorescence yields of 1.2 to 1.6%, and triplet yields of ca. 98%. Linear interpolation of internal coordinates reveals the chemical basis for relaxing the spin-forbidden intersystem crossing in these π-aromatic systems.