Ricerc@Sapienza

A novel family of nanocarbon‐based materials were designed, synthesized, and probed within the context of charge‐transfer cascades. In details, we implemented fine‐tuned chains of photo‐ and redox‐active constituents. For the first time, we integrated electron‐donating ferrocenes with light‐harvesting /electron‐donating (metallo)porphyrins and electron‐accepting graphene nanoplates (GNP) into multicomponent conjugates. To control the rate of charge flow between the individual building blocks, we bridged them via oligo‐ p ‐phenyleneethynylenes of variable lengths.

We have probed a series of multicomponent electron donor2-donor1-acceptor1 conjugates, both experimentally and computationally. The conjugates are based on the light harvester and primary electron-donor zinc-porphyrin (ZnP, donor1), to whose β-positions a secondary electron-donor ferrocene (Fc, donor2) and the primary electron-acceptor C60-fullerene (C60, acceptor1) are linked via p-phenylene-acetylene bridges of different lengths. This modular approach makes full control over shuttling electrons and holes between C60, ZnP, and Fc possible.