Construction of artificial light-harvesting system based on host-guest interactions of sulfobutylether-β-cyclodextrin and its application in photocatalysis

Light-harvesting systems (LHSs) play an important role in natural photosynthesis for converting light energy into chemical energy, which paves a prospective way for the exploitation of renewable energy resources. In this work, two artificial light-harvesting systems with an efficient energy transfer were constructed successfully in the aqueous media based on sulfobutylether-β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) and curcumin (Cur) through host-guest interactions, in which two different fluorescence dyes, sulforhodamine (SR101) and Nile blue (NiB) were employed as energy acceptors. The obtained artificial LHSs can achieve an efficient energy transfer process from β-CD+Cur to SR101 or NiB with energy transfer efficiencies of up to 16.3% and 15.8%, respectively. The energy harvested by the acceptors (SR101 and NiB) was used for photocatalysis in the aqueous phase dehalogenation of the α-bromoacetophenone reaction with a yield of up to 80%.