Intensely Luminescent Gold(Ⅰ)—Silver(Ⅰ) Cluster Complexes with Tunable Structural Features

摘要

Recent interest in luminescent metal complexes has been driven by possible applications in OLED display technology as dopant emitters, in solar photoconversion chemistry as chromophores,3 and in sensor development for luminescence detection. Potentially attractive in this regard are polynuclear Au(Ⅰ) complexes that possess intense, long-lived luminescence in the solid state at ambient temperatures with emission energies spanning the visible spectrum. Different excited-state assigments have been made for these systems including metal-centered or cluster-based (MC), ligand-to-metal charge transfer (LMCT), and intraligand (IL), with aggregation through aurophilic interactions thought to play a key role in producing the emissive state. In these studies, however, systematic variation of an isolated electronic property without simultaneous alteration of another property (i.e., steric or structural) has generally not been done. The present study reports a new series of isostructural, brilliantly luminescent gold—silver complexes having a group-16 μ_3-bridging atom in which the emission energy changes strikingly from blue to yellow to orange in going from O to S to Se. While emission properties of Au(Ⅰ) sulfide and selenide polynuclear complexes have been described previously, this is the first report of luminescence from a gold(Ⅰ) oxo system.