Nonequilibrium Phenomena in Charge Recombination of Excited Donor-Acceptor Complexes and Free Energy Gap Law

The charge recombination dynamics of excited donor-acceptor complexes in polar solvents has been investigated within the framework of the stochastic approach. The model involves the excited state formation by the pump pulse and accounts for the reorganization of a number of intramolecular high-frequency vibrational modes, for their relaxation as well as for the solvent reorganization following nonexponential relaxation. The hot transitions accelerate the charge recombination in the low exergonic region and suppress it in the region of moderate exothermicity. This straightens the dependence of the logarithm of the charge recombination rate constant on the free energy gap to the form that can be fitted to the experimental data. The free energy dependence of the charge recombination rate constant can be well fitted to the multichannel stochastic model if the donor-acceptor complexes are separated into a few groups with different values of the electronic coupling. The model provides correct description of the nonexponential charge recombination dynamics in excited donor-acceptor complexes, in particular, nearly exponential recombination in perylene-tetracyanoethylene complex in acetonitrile. It appears that majority of the initially excited donor-acceptor complexes recombines in a nonthermal (hot) stage when the nonequilibrium wave packet passes through a number of term crossings corresponding to transitions toward vibrational excited states of the electronic ground state in the area of the low and moderate exothermicity.