Heterocycle-based isomeric chromophores with substantially varying NLO properties: a new structure-property correlation study.

A number of heterocycle-based aromatic and quinonoid molecular systems have been considered for the theoretical study of their electric response properties. The nonlinear optical (NLO) parameters have been calculated by using the ab initio MO and DFT methods. An approximate scheme for calculating the first hyperpolarizability (beta) and second hyperpolarizability (gamma) in the framework of the sum-over-state (SOS) method have been proposed by exploiting the generalized Thomas-Kuhn sum rule (TK-SR). The NLO properties in the present scheme can be evaluated solely from the ground-state dipole moment (mu) and linear polarizability (alpha) and have been found to correlate fairly with the ab initio calculated values. The approximate scheme can be reasonably used to explain the wider range of variation of higher-order polarizabilities in terms of the above quantities. The position of the N atom in the thiazole ring at the ortho position (versus meta position) to the acceptor increases beta and decreases gamma for aromatic compounds, while the reverse trend is found with quinonoid compounds. In the case of the pyridine ring, the shifting of the N atom toward the acceptor enhances gamma, with insignificant variation of beta predicted for both the aromatic and quinonoid molecules. The negative contribution of the cubic polarizability of the quinonoid species increases linearly with alpha(2)/mean transition energy (Delta E).