Open‐Shell‐Character‐Based Molecular Design Principles: Applications to Nonlinear Optics and Singlet Fission

Open‐shell character, e. g., diradical character, is a quantum chemically well‐defined quantity in ground‐state molecular systems, which is not an observable but can quantify the degree of effective bond weakness in the chemical sense or electron correlation strength in the physical sense. Because this quantity also correlates to specific excited states, physicochemical properties concerned with those states are expected to strongly correlate to the open‐shell character. This feature enables us to open a new path to revealing the mechanism of these properties as well as to realizing new design principles for efficient functional molecular systems. This account explains the open‐shell‐character‐based molecular design principles and introduces their applications to the rational design of highly efficient nonlinear optical and singlet fission molecular systems.