Comment on “Magnetic Field Effects on Singlet Fission and Fluorescence Decay Dynamics in Amorphous Rubrene”

This was a purely computation project based around a quantum mechanical model of molecular spin interactions in the presence of magnetic fields, for the purpose of predicting efficiency of triplet-triplet annihilation upconversion and singlet fission. This was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, DOI: acs.jpcc.6b04934.

It was written in the form of a Comment on a previously published paper. The reason for this was we wanted to use the spin-Hamiltonian method as part of a chapter in my PhD thesis, however the current state of the literature was, frankly, quite obviously wrong. Hence, we took a six month detour to first work on correcting the currently accepted literature reference on the molecular spin-Hamiltonian.

It actually felt kind of bad publishing this, since the Bardeen group is well known and respected. However, it’s science, and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong… right? Funnily enough, after this correction was published, Bardeen contacted David to say “no hard feelings”, which was nice. A few weeks later they published this article. My guess is they had been sitting on that experimental data but since it didn’t match their (wrong) calculations, they didn’t want to publish it. Once the model was corrected, their experimental results actually made sense!

There’s another funny story about this paper. We got sent someone’s manuscript for review which was almost a complete copy of this work. Except they made many of the same mistakes as in the original paper and were claiming we were actually wrong. What made it really funny was they had directly copied passages of text from our article and figure captions. Yes, that paper did eventually get published, and still has some of the original mistakes in it.

Published Manuscript and Supporting Information are free to access from the publisher.