Unveiling the photophysics of thiourea from CASPT2/CASSCF potential energy surfaces and singlet/triplet excited state molecular dynamics simulations

TL;DR

This study investigates the decay pathways of photoexcited thiourea in gas phase and solution using advanced quantum simulations, revealing dominant intersystem crossing and the impact of water interactions on decay delay.

Contribution

It provides detailed mechanistic insights into thiourea's excited state decay processes and highlights the significant effect of water molecules on its photophysical behavior.

Findings

Intersystem crossing (T1/S0) is the dominant decay channel in gas phase.

Water interactions significantly delay decay to the ground state.

Minor decay pathways include S2->S0 and S1->S0 transitions.

Abstract

This work describes the decay mechanism of photoexcited thiourea, both in gas phase and in solution, from the information inferred from the topography of the excited and ground state potential energy surfaces and mixed singlet/triplet quantum classical molecular dynamics simulations. Our gas phase results reveal T1/S0 intersystem crossing as the dominant (49%) intrinsic decay channel to the ground state, which reaches a population of 0.28 at the final time of our simulations (10 ps). Population of the T1, would occur after internal conversion to the S1 from the spectroscopic S2 electronic state, followed by S1->T2 intersystem crossing and T2->T1 internal conversion processes. Minor decay channels occurring exclusively along the singlet manifold, i.e. S2->S0 (33%) and S1->S0 (18%), were also observed to play a role in the relaxation of photoexcited thiourea in the gas phase. The explicit incorporation of water-thiourea interactions in our simulations was found to provoke a very significant delay in the decay to the ground state of the system, with no transitions to the S0 being registered during the first 10 ps of our simulations. Intermolecular vibrational energy redistribution and explicit hydrogen bond interaction established between water molecules and the NH2 group of thiourea were found to structurally or energetically hamper the access to the intersystem crossing or internal conversion funnels with the ground state.