Surprisingly, Stern-Volmer quenching studies revealed that there is no quenching of the emission of DABNA-1 with either the aryl halide or TMB. We thus investigated whether there is the formation of an electron donor-acceptor (EDA) complex by UV-visible absorption spectroscopy between the electron-rich TMB and the aryl halide for all three aryl halides. The absorption spectra revealed no emergence of a low-energy band and thus we concluded that there is no evidence of the formation of EDA complexes in these solutions. We then studied the photostability of DABNA-1 under the reaction conditions by comparing the absorption of the reaction mixture prior to and after photoexcitation. The absorption spectrum of the reaction mixture is the same as DABNA-1 in MeCN prior to irradiation, but it changes significantly post reaction, pointing to a photoinstability of the PC under the reaction conditions (Figure ).