How Intramolecular Vibrational Energy Transport Changes with Rigidity and Polarity of the Environment?

Vibrational energy transport through oligomeric polyethylene glycol (PEG) chains can occur ballistically via optical vibrational chain bands, showing fast and constant transport speed and high efficiency of the transport, thus offering means to transfer significant quanta of energy, exceeding 1000 cm –1 , to large distances exceeding 60 Å. We report how the intramolecular energy transport time, through-chain transport speed, and end-group cooling rate depend on the rigidity and polarity of the environment. The experiments were performed with end-group labeled PEG oligomers using two-dimensional infrared (2DIR) spectroscopy. The ballistic energy transport was initiated at one end of the chain by exciting an azido moiety at ca. 2100 cm –1 and recorded at another end of the chain by probing the carbonyl stretching mode of succinimide ester. We found that the rigidity of the environment, polystyrene (PS) matrix vs. a solution of similar polarity, did not change the energy transport times much, nor the through-chain transport speed. These results suggest that in mildly polar media, dynamic fluctuations, occurring in solution but largely frozen in a solid matrix, are not the dominant cause of the dephasing of the chain states, despite the presence of fast relaxation components in the solution. The similarity of the transport times in different media suggests that the secondary chain structure does not affect much the transport in PEG chains. The solvent polarity affected the intramolecular transport significantly: the transport efficiency in polar DMSO is ca. 1.6 fold smaller than that in nonpolar CCl 4 or PS. The cooling time of the succinimide ester end group is reduced in more polar solvents affecting the waiting time dependence shape and thus the energy arrival time to the reporter. The analysis of different ways of extracting the energy arrival time from the data is presented. The observed dependences of the through-chain transport time on the solvent polarity suggests the presence of multiple wavepackets propagating in the PEG chain with different group velocities.