Bending‐Induced Vibrational Landscape Reorganization Governs Energy Dissipation in Perylene Bisimides
Structural distortion is widely recognized to suppress emissions in organic chromophores; however, the mechanistic origin of the associated enhancement in nonradiative decay remains unresolved. Here, we employ a series of perylene bisimide derivatives with systematically controlled bending to directly elucidate the structural origin of distortion-enhanced nonradiative relaxation. A pronounced transition is observed from near-unity emission to strongly enhanced nonradiative decay within the singlet manifold, while intersystem crossing remains negligible. Time-resolved electronic spectroscopy excludes triplet-mediated pathways and establishes internal conversion as the dominant decay channel. Crucially, time-resolved Raman measurements provide direct insight into the underlying structural dynamics, revealing that bending suppresses the electronically coupled aromatic skeletal mode, reorganizes the low-frequency vibrational manifold, and accelerates vibrational dephasing. The results herein demonstrate that bending enhances internal conversion not primarily through energy-gap reduction, but by transforming the excited-state vibrational landscape into a more dissipative environment that facilitates efficient energy relaxation. More broadly, this work identifies vibrational dissipation and coherence loss as key determinants of nonradiative decay and establishes a general structure-vibrational dynamics framework for controlling excited-state energy flow in π-conjugated systems.
Authors
- Young Mee Jung (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4362-0990)
- Yeonju Park (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8310-3651)
- Woojae Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8638-8744)
- Hui‐Jun Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9567-3010)
- Jianbin Lin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0064-3079)
- Byeongjoo Kang
- Wei Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4459-1602)
- Dongho Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8668-2644)
- Di Zhao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5417-6568)
Institutions
- Kangwon National University (KR)
- Xiamen University (CN)
- Yonsei University (KR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Angewandte Chemie International Edition
- Published
- 2026-06-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.1926167
- Primary Topic
- Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemical Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Research Foundation of Korea