Radical cations of n-alkanes in irradiated solutions as studied by time-resolved magnetic field effects

The time-resolved magnetic field effect in the recombination fluorescence of spin-correlated radical ion pairs has been measured to study n-alkane radical cations in irradiated solutions at room temperature. The magnetic field effect was recorded as a ratio of fluorescence decay curves in the 0.1 T and zero magnetic fields for solutions of C₈, C₉, C₁₀, C₁₂, and C₁₆ n-alkanes in n-hexane with addition of 3 × 10^?5 M p-terphenyl-d ₁₄. A distinct maximum at 10–30 ns followed by a slowly decaying plateau was observed for all the solutions. Simulation shows that the maximum corresponds to an unresolved ESR spectrum with the peak-to-peak line-width ranging from about 1.6mT to 0.5mT for C₈ to C₁₆ radical cations. The unresolved structure is believed to result from the hyperfine couplings with many protons of the radical cation, the increase in the number of interacting protons compared with low temperature matrices being caused by the methyl group rotation and conformational motion of the carbon chain. With increase in concentration of dissolved n-alkane, the maximum in the curves first moves to longer times and finally disappears; this was attributed to the narrowing of ESR spectrum contour due to degenerate electron exchange.