Supramolecular-surface photochemistry: Supramolecular assembly organized on a clay surface facilitates energy transfer between an encapsulated donor and a free acceptor

We report the occurrence of efficient energy transfer reaction in a novel host-guest assembly composed of an anionic clay nanosheet, cationic porphyrin, and neutral aromatic molecule encapsulated within a cationic organic cavitand. The supramolecular assembly was prepared by the coadsorption of tetracationic Zn-porphyrin (acceptor) and 2-acetylanthracene (donor) enclosed within cationic organic cavitand (octaamine in its protonated form) on anionic clay nanosheets. In this arrangement under the interguest distance of 2.4 nm, almost 100% efficiency of singlet-singlet energy transfer was achieved. Detailed time-resolved fluorescence measurements revealed that the energy transfer rate constant could be attributed to a single component (1.9 × 10⁹ s^-1). This strongly suggests that the adsorption distribution of porphyrin and cavitand is rather uniform, not segregated. This is a progress from our previous study that involves energy transfer between two encapsulated neutral molecules. The use of Zn-porphyrin as an energy acceptor in this study enables to connect this energy transfer system to charge separation processes in the same manner as natural photosynthetic systems do; moreover, the efficiency of energy transfer reaction improved to almost 100% from 85% in the previous system between two cavitands.