Terahertz investigations on photoisomerisable compounds

We performed computational terahertz studies on organometallic photoisomerisable compounds, employing both gas phase and solid phase calculations. The calculations demonstrate the potential of employing terahertz techniques on photoisomerisable compounds. In particular, the trans-ligand, counterion and crystal effects are evaluated via the density functional theory calculations. In order to fully understand the terahertz responses of the photoisomerisable compounds, their experimental terahertz spectra were obtained and compared to the calculations. The calculated spectra generally predict the experimentally observed absorption peaks, while combined gas phase and solid phase calculations offer better agreement with the experiments. The first principles calculations also reveal the sensitivity of terahertz signal on the photoisomerisation processes, suggesting a photo-terahertz set-up that could be built in the future to fast screen and fully understand the photoisomerisable compounds, for related applications such as photo-transducer and photo-switch that require photoinduced geometrical changes.