TAUTOMERIC RELAXATION RATES IN THE GROUND-STATE OF TETRA-4-TERTIARY BUTYLPHTHALOCYANINE IN SHPOLSKII MATRICES

Abstract

We report experimental results of the ground state proton tunneling rate constant k in the absence of radiation to be from 0.03 to 0.35 s-1 at temperatures from 4.2 to 77 K for tetra-4-tertiary butylphthalocyanine tautomers embedded in hexadecane matrices. While a detailed microscopic description of the exact transfer mechanism is not possible from the data obtained so far, we present a model based on a new type of potential barrier and use the semiclassical WKB approximation to calculate transmission data compatible with experiment.