Internal seminar, October 2016

Georgy's internal seminar on October 21st, 2016: "Live long and phosphor: New strategy for designing photoluminescent complexes".

Cover picture:

Abstract:

Photoluminescent (PL) materials are omnipresent in modern research and technology. We encounter them in common everyday situations whether we look at our wristwatch in darkness or through the microscope at the DAPI staining results. The number of strategies for preparing luminophores is, however, limited. In this talk I will introduce you to the common strategies that chemists use to enable photoluminescence in various organic and inorganic materials and describe the approach that was developed in our Unit to enable phosphorescence in Cu(I) complexes.

We will discuss how the luminescence is governed by the donor-acceptor interactions in transition metal complexes and how alternative emitters use intermolecular aggregation effects to be photoluminescent. Finally, I will introduce our strategy for the PL material design that relies on weak non-covalent interactions that typically control intermolecular aggregation. When scaled down to the intramolecular level, such interactions give rise to a family of photoluminescent compounds that can be tuned by subtle conformational changes.