Equilibrium and nonequilibrium solvation and solute electronic structure. II. Strong coupling limit.

The formulation developed in the preceding paper [H. J. Kim and J. T. Hynes, J. Chem. Phys. 93, 5194 (1990)] is applied to describe the electronic structure and spectroscopic features of a model symmetric electron–donor–acceptor solute system D-A⇋DA- in solution in the strong coupling limit. In this limit, the electronic coupling is sufficiently strong to overcome the localizing influence of the solvent polarization, and two stable delocalized solute electronic states are found in the presence of either nonequilibrium or equilibrium solvation. The nonlinear influence of the equilibrated solvent electronic polarization and of exchange contributions to the solute electronic distribution incorporated in the theory lead to several consequences absent in standard descriptions. Among these are the necessity of two solvent coordinates to describe the system, and the prediction of solvent-dependent spectral shifts and the appearance of solvent relaxation dynamics after a Franck–Condon transition between the delocalized electronic states. Estimates of the magnitude of these new effects are provided, and the possibility for their experimental observation is briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]