The ability of coordination compounds to catalyze chemical reactions and absorb visible radiation makes them appealing targets for the development of photocatalysts. One of the attributes that makes transition metals excellent catalysts � a high density of frontier orbitals � can also lead to ultrafast quenching of electronic excited states. Understanding the properties of coordination complexes that dictate the electronic relaxation dynamics has practical, as well as fundamental importance. Most successful photosensitizers and photocatalysts have utilized 4d and 5d metal centers. The significant cost and low abundance of many 4d and 5d metals has inspired attempts to substitute high cost atoms with isoelectronic 3d metal complexes. But the exchange iron for ruthenium increases the charge transfer relaxation rate by roughly a factor of one million. The huge distinction in lifetimes has generally been attributed to differences in the ligand field excite state energies. But we currently still lack a detailed understanding of how ligand field excited states and charge transfer excited states interact and how this depends upon nuclear and electronic structure. In this work, we investigated the role of ligand field excited states in the relaxation dynamics of photogenerated charge transfer states in a series of iron(II) coordination compounds with hard x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES). The tremendous sensitivity of XES to the charge and spin state of the transition metal centers make these techniques ideally suited to investigating the electron dynamics in coordination chemistry. By studying mixed cyanide and bipyridine ligands with advanced x-ray spectroscopy, we discovered that the excited state decay pathway can be controlled and adjusted by systematically tuning the ligand field splitting. We demonstrated that changing the iron ligands lend to a 100-fold increase in the charge transfer excited state lifetime, a critical metric for earth abundant photosensitizers.

Electron transfer excited state relaxation in coordination complexes

245th National Meeting (2013)

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