Kinetics of a photoinduced NH tautomerism of free-base porphyrins in crystalline matrices at low temperatures: Computer simulations and experiment

Photoinduced NH tautomerism, along with the reaction pathways of phototautomerization in tetrabenzoporphin and porphin free bases in n-octane polycrystalline matrices at 77 K, is studied by simulation of kinetic processes and their experimental observation. The simulation of the processes is performed by the numerical solution of the system of kinetic equations describing the populations of electronic levels and transitions between them. Kinetic dependences are obtained by measuring the perturbation of stationary fluorescence of one component of the 0-0 doublet origin upon pulsed selective photoexcitation of the other component. For two tautomeric forms related by the reversibility of the photochemical reaction, under the assumption of synchronism of the NH rearrangement, (i) analytical solutions governing the reaction rate are found, (ii) a method of measuring the rate constants of the proton rearrangement is suggested and the constants themselves are estimated, and (iii) direct evidence of the participation of T ₁ levels in the photochemical reaction is obtained. With the aid of numerical simulations, the specific features of kinetic manifestation of an asynchronous mechanism of the photoinduced NH rearrangement are studied.