QUENCHING OF A RETINAL TRIPLET STATE BY A NITROXYL RADICAL

Abstract— The long lived triplets from all-trans retinal and 11-cis retinal are quenched by a nitroxyl radical, 4-hydroxy-2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidinoyl, with essentially identical rate constants. The rates vary with solvent but do not correlate with solvent polarity. The results confirm implications of earlier work with oxygen quenching and are compatible with the view that isomerization occurs in non-relaxed triplets or that the triplet (or triplets) observed spectroscopically decay by way of a single triplet state which has a small electronic energy gap to ground state isomers.