Spectroscopy of the monoclinic and orthorhombic crystalline forms of alltrans-diphenylhexatriene (DPH) and all-trans-diphenyloctatetraene (DPO)show absorption and emission bands that do not generate the widely known Stokes shift of the polyene compounds, discovered by Hausser et al. in 1953 and repeatedly studied over the last 60 years. It can be concluded from our study that the crystallization system, whether in a monoclinic or orthorhombic system, does not significantly influence the photophysics of DPH and DPO in the crystal phase. K E Y W O R D S absorption and emission spectra of single crystals of DPH and DPO, photophysics of coplanar structures of diphenylpolyenes, Stokes shift of diphenylpolyenes
| INTRODUCTIONResearch on the spectroscopy of polyene compounds has grown substantially over the last century for several reasons: (a) the central role played by retinal chromophores in the biochemistry of vision, [1,2] (b) by the role played by carotenoid antennas in the photosynthesis process, [3,4] (c) because β-carotene is the molecular structure of provitamin A, [5] and (d) because the spectral behavior of polyenes was essential both for Lewis [6] to establish the theory of color in organic chemistry and for Maccoll [7] to develop his reasoning about the resonance effect.It is noteworthy to emphasize the importance of these compounds in the construction of volume-conserving models for the mechanism of cis-trans photoisomerization in the bicycle-pedal [8] or hula-twist [9,10] process, which are crucial to understand the photoisomerization of 11-cis-retinal to all-trans-retinal that