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THE PHOTOTOXOICITY OF POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBONS: A THEORETICAL STUDY OF EXCITED STATES AND CORRELATION TO EXPERIMENT
Citation:
Betowski, L D., M. Enlow, AND L A. Riddick. THE PHOTOTOXOICITY OF POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBONS: A THEORETICAL STUDY OF EXCITED STATES AND CORRELATION TO EXPERIMENT. COMPUTERS AND CHEMISTRY 26(4):371-377, (2002).
Impact/Purpose:
Provide state-of-the-science sampling, analysis, separation, and detection methods to allow rapid, accurate field and laboratory analyses of contaminated soils, sediments, biota, and groundwater to support Superfund clean-up decisions. Apply state-of-the-science methods in chemical analysis and data interpretation (e.g., mass spectral interpretation) to actual problems of OSWER, the Regions, and the States, in cooperation with the Las Vegas Technical Support Center as well as by direct contacts with Regional and State employees. Provide technical advice and guidance to OSWER using the environmental chemistry expertise (e.g., mass spectrometry, analytical methods development, clean-up methodology, inorganics, organometallics, volatile organics, non-volatile organics, semi-volatile organics, separation technologies, etc.) found within the branch.
Technical research support for various projects initiated either by Regions/Program Offices or ECB scientists. While these efforts will support the Regions and Program Offices, they cannot be predicted or planned in advance, and may serve multiple duty (e.g., solve real-world problems, serve to ground-truth analytical approaches that ECB is developing, transfer new technology). Many of the activities in this task support requests involving enforcement decisions and therefore are categorized as "environmental forensics".
Description:
Investigators using models to determine the phototoxic effects of sunlight on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHS) have invoked the excited states of the molecule as important in elucidating the mechanism of these reactions. Energies of actual excited states were calculated for ten PAHs by several ab initio methods. The main method used for these calculations was the Configuration Interaction approach, modeling excited states as combinations of single substitutions out of the Hartree-Fock ground state. These calculations correlate well with both experimentally measured singlet and triplet state energies and also previous HOMO-LUMO gap energies that approximate the singlet state energies. The excited state calculations then correlate well with general models of photo-induced toxicity based for the PAHS. (D 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.