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A strategy for improving the room-temperature luminescence properties of Ru(II) complexes with tridentate ligands
Yuan-Qing Fang1, Nicholas J Taylor, Garry S Hanan
1Department of Chemistry, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Abstract:
Several ruthenium(II) complexes with new tridentate polypyridine ligands have been prepared, and their photophysical properties have been studied. The new tridentate ligands are tpy-modified systems (tpy = 2,2':6',2' '-terpyridine) in which aromatic substituents designed to be coplanar with the tpy moiety are introduced, with the aim of enhancing delocalization in the acceptor ligand of the potentially luminescent metal-to-ligand charge-transfer (MLCT) state and increasing the MLCT-MC energy gap (MC = metal-centered excited state). Indeed, the Ru(II) complexes obtained with this new family of tridentate ligands exhibit long-lived luminescence at room temperature (up to 200 ns). The enhanced luminescence properties of these complexes support this design strategy and are superior to those of the model Ru(tpy)22+ compound and compare favorably with those of the best Ru(II) complexes with tridentate ligands reported so far.
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