Unravelling the Role of Water in Ultrafast Excited-State Relaxation Dynamics within Nano-Architectures of Chlorophyll a

Water plays a pivotal role in structural stability of supramolecular pigment assemblies designed for natural light harvesting (for example, chlorosome antenna complex) as well as their artificial analogs. However, the dynamic role of water in the context of excite-state relaxation has not been explored till date, which we report here. Using femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, we investigate the excited-state dynamics of two types of nano-scale assemblies of chlorophyll a with different structural motifs, rod-shaped and micellar assemblies, that depend on the water content. We show how water participates in excess energy dissipation by vibrational cooling of the non-thermally populated Q_y band at different rates in different types of clusters but exhibits no polar solvation dynamics. For the micelles, we observe a bifurcation of stimulated emission line shape, whereas a positive-to-negative switching of differential absorption is observed for the rods; both these observations are correlated with their specific structural aspects. Density functional theory calculations reveal two possible stable ground state geometries of dimers, accounting for the bifurcation of line shape in micelles. Thus, our study elucidates water-mediated structure–function relationship within these pigment assemblies.     

Review of the preparation,characterization, and luminescence properties of Pr3+-doped CaTiO3 phosphors

Research on Chemical Intermediates - In this paper we review the luminescence properties of Pr3+-doped CaTiO3 phosphors, the different methods of sample preparation, and characterization of the...     

Improved third‐order weighted essentially nonoscillatory scheme

A new third‐order WENO scheme is proposed to achieve the desired order of convergence at the critical points for scalar hyperbolic equations. A new reference smoothness indicator is introduced, which satisfies the sufficient condition on the weights for the third‐order convergence. Following the truncation error analysis, we have shown that the proposed scheme achieves the desired order accurate for smooth solutions with arbitrary number of vanishing derivatives if the parameter ε satisfies certain conditions. We have made a comparative study of the proposed scheme with the existing schemes such as WENO‐JS, WENO‐Z, and WENO‐N3 through different numerical examples. The result shows that the proposed scheme (WENO‐MN3) achieves better performance than these schemes.     

Third‐order WENO scheme with a new smoothness indicator

In this article, we have devised a new reference smoothness indicator for third‐order weighted essentially non‐oscillatory (WENO) scheme to achieve desired order of convergence at critical points. In the context of the weighted essentially non‐oscillatory scheme, reference smoothness indicator is constructed in such a way that it satisfies the sufficient condition on the weights for the third‐order convergence. The goal is to construct a reference smoothness indicator such that the resulted scheme have to achieve the required order of accuracy even if the first two derivatives vanish but not the third derivative. The construction of such reference smoothness indicator is not possible through a linear combination of local smoothness indicators only. We have proposed a reference smoothness indicator to be of the fourth order of accuracy on three‐point stencil that contains the linear combination of the first derivative information of the local and global stencils. The performance enhancement of the WENO scheme through this reference smoothness indicator is verified through the standard numerical experiments. Numerical results indicate that the new scheme provides better results in comparison with the earlier third‐order WENO schemes like WENO‐JS and WENO‐Z. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fano Resonant Cuboidal Dielectric Nanoantennas

Optics and Spectroscopy - In this paper, we report Fano resonance in the dielectric disk and rod cuboidal nanoparticles. In these nanoparticles, forward to backward scattering ratio is enhanced as...     

Synthesis and characterization of terbium doped TiO2 nanoparticles and their use as recyclable and reusable heterogeneous catalyst for efficient and environmentally sustainable synthesis of spiroannulated indolo[3,2-c]quinolines- mimetic scaffolds of isocryptolepine

An efficient and environmentally sustainable domino protocol has been presented for the synthesis of structurally diverse spiroannulated indolo[3,2-c]quinolines involving three component sequential reaction of phenylhydrazine, o-aminoacetophenone and cyclic ketones using nanostructured terbium doped TiO₂ as recyclable and reusable heterogeneous catalyst. The nanostructured catalyst was synthesized successfully and characterized by X-ray Diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), EDX and Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (FTIR). The substitution of Ti⁺⁴ with Tb⁺³ and the formation of Ti-O-Tb bonds as a result of doping of Terbium with TiO₂ NPs increases the catalytic efficiency and facilitates the reaction to provide the products in excellent yields. The present protocol with special features; operational simplicity, atom-economy, mild reaction conditions, environmental sustainability and high synthetic efficiency with recyclability and reusability of catalyst has been reported for the first time to synthesize spiroannulated indoloquinolines and expecting to provide the library of promising new leads in drug discovery research.