Photoinduced energy transfer in transition metal complex oligomers

The work done over the past three years has been directed toward the preparation, characterization and photophysical examination of mono- and bimetallic diimine complexes. The work is part of a broader project directed toward the development of stable, efficient, light harvesting arrays of transition metal complex chromophores. One focus has been the synthesis of rigid bis-bidentate and bis-tridentate bridging ligands. The authors have managed to make the ligand bphb in multigram quantities from inexpensive starting materials. The synthetic approach used has allowed them to prepare a variety of other ligands which may have unique applications (vide infra). They have prepared, characterized and examined the photophysical behavior of Ru(II) and Re(I) complexes of the ligands. Energy donor/acceptor complexes of bphb have been prepared which exhibit nearly activationless energy transfer. Complexes of Ru(II) and Re(I) have also been prepared with other polyunsaturated ligands in which two different long lived (> 50 ns) excited states exist; results of luminescence and transient absorbance measurements suggest the two states are metal-to-ligand charge transfer and ligand localized {pi}{r_arrow}{pi}* triplets. Finally, the authors have developed methods to prepare polymetallic complexes which are covalently bound to various surfaces. The long term objective of this work is to make light harvesting arrays for the sensitization of large band gap semiconductors. Details of this work are provided in the body of the report