Supersonic jet spectroscopy of synthetic foldamers, multichromophores, and their water containing clusters

Buchanan, Evan Gardner. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2014. Supersonic Jet Spectroscopy of Synthetic Foldamers, Multichromophores, and Their Water Containing Clusters. Major Professor: Timothy S. Zwier. A central theme specific to this dissertation concerns the conformation-specific spectroscopy of flexible molecules in an effort to bridge the complexity gap. Generally, molecules in the complexity gap have several flexible coordinates yet conformational isomerization still occurs along a simple reaction coordinate on the potential energy surface. Molecules in this regime benefit greatly from experiments probing the potential energy surfaces and provide a means to develop and test new theories in an effort to explain more complex system. These measurements are possible through the utilization of a supersonic jet expansion to collisionally cool molecules into their vibrational zeropoint levels, collapsing the distribution of conformational isomers to the lowest-energy minima on the potential energy surface. This collisional cooling afforded by the expansion allows researchers to study transient species, molecular cluters, radicals and ions in a conformation-specific fashion. Overall, this dissertation contains three sets of molecules in an effort to bridge the complexity gap: synthetic foldamers, multichromophores, and water containing complexes. For the synthetic foldamers, a set of 21 conformations that represent the full range of H-bonded structures were chosen to characterize the conformational dependence of the