We’re very excited to have two big papers on singlet fission out this month, inspired by some very insightful measurements by Woojae Kim back when he was a postdoc. In Heterogeneous singlet fission in a covalently linked pentacene dimer (Cell Reports Physical Science) we show how photophysically messy even ‘clean’ dimeric systems can be. The structural heterogeneity we report causes a major headache for spectroscopic analysis, but on the bright side it provides a new handle to steer the dynamics of singlet fission systems from femtosecond to microsecond timescales!

And in a companion study published this week in Nature Chemistry, it looks like the community has been going about singlet fission all wrong for all these years! Turns out that even with a very simple experiment (pump-probe) we can readily directly generate the triplet-pair state without any need for the singlet to first ‘fiss’. This seems like one of the rare mechanistic phenomena that extends from intramolecular to intermolecular fission regimes, suggesting it’s a general property of the TT state. And watch this space – there’s plenty more to come!