Department of Chemistry
Researcher:
So-Ming Tong Glenna, Postdoctoral Fellow (tongsm@hku.hk)
Chi-Ming Che, Dr. Hui Wai Haan Chair of Chemistry (cmche@hku.hk)
Project Title:
Photophysics of Transition Metal Complexes
Project Description:
Fundamental understanding of various factors, including the identity of the transition metal ion and its oxidation state, the nature of the auxiliary ligands and the coordination geometry to the transition metal ions, and the solvent, and their interplay to see how these affects the photophysics of the transition metal complexes
Project Duration:
3 years
Project Significance:
Transition metal complexes have received widespread interest due to its applications in a wide variety of fields such as photovoltaics, organic light emitting diode, imaging and sensing, and photochemical reactions. Fundamental understanding of these various factors would thus be indispensable in designing materials of stated interests.
Results Achieved:
We have published several papers of how subtle changes in the auxiliary ligand affects the photophysics of the transition metal complexes:
- "Cyclometalated Platinum(II) Complexes as Highly Sensitive Luminescent Switch-On Probes for Practical Application in Protein Staining and Cell Imaging", Chem. Eur. J., 15(15), pp3652 (2009)
- "Emissive or Nonemissive? A Theoretical Analysis of the Phosphorescence Efficiencies of Cyclometalated Platinum(II) Complexes", Chem. Eur. J., 15(29), pp7225 (2009)
- "Ligand-to-Ligand Charge-Transfer Transitions of Platinum(II) Complexes with Arylacetylide Ligands with Different Chain Lengths: Spectroscopic Characterization, Effect of Molecular Conformations, and Density Functional Theory Calculations", Chem. Eur. J., 16(22), pp6540 (2010)
Remarks on the Use of High Performance Computing Clusters:
We have been using G03 software installed in the supercomputers. Many of the computations which take weeks or months to finish on PCs could be obtained no more than three days. This speed up our research progress as time would not be wasted on waiting for the results. It is especially of great help as we need to several geometries with atom number more than 70.
